The original Cubieboards used on-chip AHCI SATA controllers. Allwinner dropped it from their newer chips, presumably because they're targeting tablet use and there's no need for them.

Olimex boards have a direct SATA connection. This is on a Lime-A10 with a cheap 2.5" 1TB drive, about 70% full so some fragmentation etc:

# dd if=/dev/zero of=6G bs=1M count=6144

6144+0 records in

6144+0 records out

6442450944 bytes (6.4 GB) copied, 136.176 s, 47.3 MB/s

# dd if=6G of=/dev/null bs=1M

6144+0 records in

6144+0 records out

6442450944 bytes (6.4 GB) copied, 93.6363 s, 68.8 MB/s

Also they have a nice battery connector, they'll keep the battery charged and switch to it if main power fails (and even keep the SATA drive powered (not sure if you plug a 3.5" one, though)).

Is native sata that much better than a usb3 adapter? All of the chips that offered sata were SATA 2.0, or 300MB/s. USB3 goes up to 625MB/s.

If a board with SATA 3.0 existed, that is still just 600MB/s.

The Banana Pi Pro (not the regular Banana Pi) is the only one I know of that has real SATA.

Allwinner A20 has directly connected SATA.