This board is a bit intresting https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-motherboard-32-sata-ports,40408.html The Onda B250 D32-D3 and B250 D32-D3 IPFS motherboards sport up to 32 SATA ports.

thinking of a surfminer setup?

Yes sir :grin:

With that, if you can throw cheap SSD on them, PoolMiner (+mdadm) or Arktika should be able to do pretty well.

I wonder if it can actually saturate each with IOPS

I would expect to be disappointed

which if you think about it, is a fun riddle. If I am expecting that, is it really a disappointment?

the sata controllers usually limit the iops, no idea of that one

for arktika, something like this could be interesting https://www.anandtech.com/print/14902/intel-ethernet-800-series-to-support-nvme-over-tcp-pcie-40 Intel Ethernet 800 Series To Support NVMe over TCP, PCIe 4.0