[en] Large-area linear Silicon Drift Detectors (SDD) were developed to be used in the Silicon Vertex Tracker (SVT) of the STAR experiment at the BNL Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). The design of the SDD has been finalized and submitted for large-scale production. Test results show that the detector exhibits excellent position resolution and low noise. A special characterization procedure was developed to test detector wafers in order to select good detectors for the SVT. Recently, 15 STAR/SVT SDDs were assembled as a tracking device in a BNL-AGS heavy-ion experiment (E896). This was the first tracking application of these detectors and their corresponding front-end electronics in an experimental environment. Preliminary results indicating good detector performance are shown and discussed in this paper