I have two 750GB 7200rpm drives and they work just fine. They
are both sata drives.

I have a 200 GB Samsung SATA and a 500 GB Seagate SATA. I also have three
external drives a LaCie 160 GB and a 60 GB IDE Maxtor and 160 GB IDE Western
Digital in cases that I bought separately. All work fine with any version of
Linux that I have tried, including Jaunty (9.04).

I know many people who have TB drives. Remember than Linux works on servers that
run some of the biggest companies, including Google, eBay, Amazon, Wikipedia,
etc. They all handle vast amounts of data.

BTW, Jaunty supports etx4 which is way faster than ext3 and it handles much
larger files (up to 16 TBs) with ease. It can handle a volume up to 1 exabyte (1
million terabytes). Transfer is smoking fast. :)

Likewise, I have two SATA drives on one of my servers plus the IDE. The
IDE is faster so I keep the OS and programs there. All my data is on
the two SATA drives. Works great.

"The IDE is faster". I imagined the SATA drives were faster as it
seems from what i can gather that the IDEs are being phased out. I've
spent a while looking at the best value for money and my choice was
down to 40, 80, 160 GBs - £30 - £37.

I have two IDE remote cases hence IDE. Due to my machine being 3/4
years old i don't think it can take SATA drives. While the connection
is serial rather than parallel [8 pin instead of 80 or so], less
material, faster, and provide hot swopping. and now much cheaper than
IDE.

Or is this theory rather than practice!

The SATA's spin down if not accessed for <timeout> seconds.
The latency induced by spinup causes me to call them "slower"
I got these about three years ago so things may have changed.

have installed a new 500 GB in an older Dell and run 8.04 and it sails
right along no trouble at all.