I had a previous generation Mac Pro which I sold a few months ago for a good price thinking that new machines were coming out. So, whilst I can't really afford it, I'm ready to splash the cash on a ...

There is just not enough surface area on an ITX mobo for that many ports. You are likely going to have to move-up in size to a miniATX mobo to get 8x SATA ports on the mobo. Something like this ...

The first SSD I ever used was the Samsung 860 EVO — a 250GB SATA drive that was a phenomenal upgrade over my hard drive back in 2018. As great as it was, I naturally switched to NVMe SSDs over the ...