I currently have a ATX gaming setup with roughly 9x 2.5" SSD drives that I have come to realization that it is simply not practical to squeeze all the drives and high-end GPUs and CPUs into 1 system. Not to mention, even most common ATX boards will start to run into difficulties trying to support that many SATA ports without affecting PCIe bandwidth. After coming to this conclusion, I am leaning towards building a separate ITX or mATX system dedicated to just housing 12+ 2.5" SSDs and having it be on 24/7 and it only being accessed offline via LAN. Since I manually backup my data on external 3.5" drives every week, the storage solution will not need any RAID mirroring.

Since this is my first time looking into a 24/7 server setup, I am unsure if there are certain things I need to consider for system reliability. Some questions I have are:

1. Between Intel LGA1700 and AMD AM5, which would be a better platform? For example, I just learned not all LGA1700 chips support ECC memory while AM5 chips have higher idle power consumption that low-end LGA1700.
2. Would a consumer-grade ITX or mATX motherboard be good enough for 24/7 operation? Beside ECC support, are there other factors I should consider?
3. Also what HBAs should I be considering? I know it is probably crude, but I was considering using a x16 to x8/x8 or x4/x4/x4/x4 m.2 card to hook up with multiple JMB585 5-port SATA cards and use 3-4 of them on a motherboard to get up to 20 SATA devices.

I was leaning towards Intel LGA1700 for the lower idle power consumption despite the limited x8/x8 PCie bifurcation options, but this latest discovery of ECC memory not being supported on 1x100 and 1x400 chips does make me change my mind.