Looking at building a nice small mini itx build. Just a few questions,

 

#1 can i start with one Hard Drive, IE 2TB and add more when i get money!

#2 would this be ok for the main board "Intel Desktop Board D945GCLF2" it comes with a Atom CPU on it. Would that be enough for up to 6 drives?

You would probably get more responses under the "Hardware" section.  Also, "running" unraid with just one drive would be pointless... you can run anything with just one drive.  To even begin taking advantage of doing Unraid (from my limited experience), you will need to have at least 2 drives... and even then it seems sort of pointless.

 

In any case, save your money and wait to do it right.

yea thats true about the HardDrives, BUT WHAT ABOUT THE MOTHERBOARD! is a AtomCPU best suit for this type of OS!

There should be no problem running an atom for even higher number of HDDs.

 

If you never expect to run addons then an Intel Atom cpu is fine for the server.

 

If you plan on running addons and still want a power efficient build, then look into the Intel i3 530 CPU paired with an H55-chipset motherboard; it typically idles about the same as the Atom systems (35-40 watts) yet provides obscene levels of cpu performance.

 

I don't know if this is still true with the newer Atom CPUs&MBs, but the sata ports on the earlier Intel Atom motherboards (the 2xx or 3xx Atom CPUs) were provided by the ICH7 southbridge and providers lower throughput in benchmarks. If performance isn't a main factor in your decision, then even the older Atom CPUs&MBs are fine.