If you say Y here, you will use the full-featured IDE driver to
control up to ten ATA/IDE interfaces, each being 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
<http://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/>.

To compile this driver as a module, choose M here and read
Documentation/ide.txt. The module will be called ide-mod.
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, say Y or M here. If your system
has no IDE drives, or if memory requirements are really tight, you
could say N here, and select the "Old hard disk driver" below
instead to save about 13 KB of memory in the kernel.

source code:

drivers/ide/