Description

If you say yes here, you will use the full-featured IDE driver to control up to ten ATA/IDE interfaces, each one able to serve a "master" and a "slave" device, for a total of up to twenty ATA/IDE disk/cdrom/tape/floppy drives.

Useful information about large (540 MB) IDE disks, multiple interfaces, what to do if ATA/IDE devices are not automatically detected, sound card ATA/IDE ports, module support, and other topics, is contained in Documentation/ide.txt. For detailed information about hard drives, consult the Disk-HOWTO and the Multi-Disk-HOWTO, available from https://www.tldp.org/docs.html#howto.

To fine-tune ATA/IDE drive/interface parameters for improved performance, look for the hdparm package at ftp://ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/system/hardware.

Do not compile this driver as a module if your root file system (the one containing the directory /) is located on an IDE device.

If you have one or more IDE drives, enable this option. If your system has no IDE drives, or if memory requirements are really tight, you could say no here, and select the Old hard disk driver option instead to save about 13 KB of memory in the kernel.