Sas drive and controller question

[Calumus]

Hi all, I've been lurking here for a while but this is my 1st post. My buisness partner and I stumbled upon a pretty sweet deal recently and picked up 6 147Gb Hitachi 15k rpm, 16mb buffer sas drives, and 4 Seagate scsi 10.4 drives. All new in the box. Most of them are going up for sale but I kept a hitachi for myself. I ordered a Promise FastTrack TX2650 card as my Gigabyte P35-DS3L obviously doesn't have an onboard sas controller. My idea was to clone my existing windows partition using Acronis to the sas drive, then use my existing sata drive for storage alone. This is my first forray into the world of sas drives and just wanted to get feedback from people who have some experience if this will work. My bios does have the option to set a controller card as the 1st boot device so I'm not worried about that, I'm just curious what to expect when I try cloning the drive. Anyone here have any experience with this?

 

[Rubycon]

If the (boot) host changes you may have to do a repair from the os disc. Otherwise, should be fine.

 

[Arcanedeath]

Make sure you load the Sas controler driver before cloning your OS or it may not be bootable w/out a repair.

 

[Calumus]

Thanks for the responses guys. I installed the card and drive, got everything up and running then backed up my boot partition with Acronis. Now, I'm not sure if I don't have something set right or if I was expecting too much from this drive; but the performance increase has been underwhelming to say the least. In the promise card's bios I had 3 options. Raids 0 or 1, or jbod. Seeing as I only want to run one drive for simplicity's sake I chose the jbod option. Windows boots slower then it did on my sata drive. It hangs for about 10 seconds or so on the screen before the XP splash screen before it starts really loading. My HDTach tests show a burst of 135mb/s, an average read of 77mb/s and a seek time of 6.6ms. Not exactly what I was expecting from a 15,000rpm drive. I also ran PCMark05 and was a bit dissappointed with those results as well. It showed HDD - XP Startup 8.82 MB/s, and HDD - General Usage 5.61 MB/s, Is this some sort of glitch, or is this nomal for this type of drive? Here's the link to the test
http://service.futuremark.com/compare?pcm05=1495471
Any suggestions you guys have would be appriciated. Thanks,
Shawn.