ATA/IDE/MFM/RLL support: This section contains important options for those using IDE drives, CD-ROMs, DVD-ROMs, and other peripherals. If your system has IDE disks, be sure to enable "Enhanced IDE/MFM/RLL disk/cdrom/tape/floppy support," "Include IDE/ATA-2 DISK support", and the chipset appropriate to your particular motherboard (built-in to the kernel, not as modules -- so your system can boot!). If you have an IDE CD-ROM, be sure to enable "Include IDE/ATAPI CD-ROM support" as well. Note: without specific chipset support, IDE will still work but may not take advantage of all the performance-enhancing features of your particular motherboard.

Also note that the "Enable PCI DMA by default if available" is a highly recommended option for nearly all systems. Without DMA (direct memory access) enabled by default, your IDE peripherals will run in PIO mode and may perform up to 15 times slower than normal! You can verify that DMA is enabled on a particular disk by typing hdparm -d 1 /dev/hdx at the shell prompt as root, where /dev/hdx is the block special device corresponding to the disk on which you'd like to enable DMA.