Comment 22 for bug 157909

Even disregarding SATA at all: IDE interfaces and drives are still being
used, produced, and sold, and, IMHO, it should be supported.

A gutsy system is unbootable when an extra IDE controller in addition to
the IDE controllers on the main board is installed, which is quite
likely for anyone having >4 IDE drives. That may be rare, but
sufficiently common to affect a significant number of systems.

Aaron C. de Bruyn wrote:
> Re the comment about motherboards and interfaces, I just purchased a new
> board supports 12 SATA connections onboard. It also supports 2 IDE
> connections. I'm building a mid-range storage server for my home
> office. Eventually I'll have enough in the budget to toss a RAID card
> in instead of doing softraid. This could complicate things more due to
> the fact that a lot of SATA RAID controllers I run into present the
> array as an IDE drive.
>
> When I did my initial testing on this bug, I noticed the 'make
> menuconfig' section of the kernel would only allow me to specify a
> maximum of 9.
>
> On one hand, it's probably unheard of to find a system that supports 9
> IDE drives (requiring 4+ IDE interfaces on the board), but on the other
> hand, it's not unheard of to find RAID cards exposing themselves as IDE
> drives which could give you a huge number of IDE drives for the system.
>