installed new drives and controller card, help please.

I just got my Areca 1210 raid coontroller card installed and my new hard drives. My aim is to achive the following:2 x 300 GB raptors, 1 x 150 GB raptor and 1 x 1TB WD Caviar drive connected to the controller card.My operating system on new 60GB SSD, connected to SATA port on the motherboard.I do not plan at this stage to set up a RAID array, just use the controller card to run the 4 hard drives, to minimise load on the OS and speed up my texture loading. So, i have not used or been into the Bios set up utility for the controller card. All the instructions are about setting up RAID arrays. Can I just plug the hard drives into the controller card and they will be detected and work? I have installed the drivers for the controller card.Is there a relatively easy way to copy over my OS to my new SSD drive? How can I then boot from the new drive? I have acronis disk director and O&O disk image cheers, mark