A high speed alternative for SCSI harddrives. The performance of SATA-1 compliant devices is equivalent with 10,000 RPM SCSI drives (Ultra160/Ultra320).
FedoraCore 1 recognises this hardware when booting from CD. It will also will happily install/boot to/from a 160 GB SATA HDD from CDROM after it recognises and configures the Silicon Images PCI card.
It seems that there's a 2.4.x patch, the driver is in 2.6, and there's a binary driver provided as well. Read about the SiL3112A Linux driver thread at LinuxQuestions.
I got this working using the Debian Installer Beta 4 netinst ISO. At one point it required me to "Execute a shell" and modprobe the sata_sil module manually, but apart from that it was reasonably painless. Kernel 2.6's SATA support was easy to get working using the netinst ISO - I wasn't successful in my attempts at getting it working with 2.4 though.
13 pages link to SATA: