Intel and AMD chipsets are fine SATA controllers (set to AHCI mode in BIOS if applicable).
This doesn’t seem too bad. Enough space for lots of hard disks, and enough PCIe lanes for NVME.
I do like the machinezand specs. That would work.
I need to check. Price would be around 546$CAD including shipping.
Server looks alot like those old IXSystems used for FreeNAS. we are decommitioning a couple of those 36 bays at work !
X99 is fine, but I don’t think it supports ECC.
Thus you might as well just find a Supermicro X10 motherboard, and use the same Xeon processor in that.
All my production systems are still X10 
The X99 supports ecc… you need ddr4 ecc 2400mhz. You havecthe purchase option with 32Gb ecc.
To close this discussion, I opted to get a supermicro motherboard X11SPI-TF with a Xeon gold 6138 processor and 128GB ram.
the 16x slots are enough for the 8x 1TB nvme drives and enough sata port for the rest of my array of spinning disk. the 2x 10GBE will work great and I can add a fiberchannel card to do the backend storage links.
Thanks all for all the great suggestions ! 
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