Increase IDE Drive letters beyond dev/hdz to dev/hdaa, similar to scsi drive lettering

Increase IDE Drive letters beyond dev/hdz to dev/hdaa, similar to scsi drive lettering

[Tyler]

Is there a simple way to patch the ide driver to support drive letters 
beyond dev/hdz, to roll over to hdaa,hdab, etc?  The scsi drive 
lettering currently does this.. going sda to sdz, then sdaa,sdab,sdac, etc.

The reason I need this is for using 4 x Highpoint 454 (hpt374 chipset, 8 
drives each card) PATA cards in a software md raid, but of course it 
runs out of drive letters, and starts using funny characters such as 
dev/hd{ , and dev/hd\207 or something..

Beyond that, is there a way to merge hpt36x/hpt374 chipset support into 
libata, since libata uses scsi emulation with scsi drive lettering?  It 
seems that is a goal of libata anyways, to support older PATA chipsets 
as well.

And, yet one more option, would be to choose in the kernel config, 
whether you want the hpt374 driver to use ide, or scsi emulation.. 
currently, the tainted proprietary driver directly from highpoint uses 
scsi emulation.. surely it could merged as an option for the driver 
thats included in the kernel?

Regards,
Tyler Guthrie.