I just bought a cheap white box to get things moving… And TIL that if you have 4 x SATA ports on a motherboard, but actually try to use them at the same time as the onboard M2 SATA slot… it will disable one of those 4 x SATA ports.

My HTPC is a white box too, but uses a dedicated SATA card for 8 x 3.5" HDDs, leaving the onboard stuff for the M2 and a second SSD for cache.

Off to Amazon to buy the cheapest China spec controller I can lol.