i looked up a review of the speed of the latest class 10 micro-sd cards:
http://highonandroid.com/android-accessories/fastest-micro-sd-card-shootout-...
some of these are 128gbyte micro-sd cards. random and arbitrary as it is, some of these micro-sd cards are doing 85 megabytes per second read speed, and 54mbytes/sec write speed.
not even intel's 120gbyte "enterprise" SATA SSD from a couple of years ago could match that kind of read or write speed.
on slashdot we've already seen announcements - just last week - that NAND is already being retired, and that the top solid-state companies will be doing enormous SD cards using the new 3D flash storage (istrc one was planning a 512gbyte card).
so i really, really question the strict need for SATA ports, these days. in the embedded world, eMMC is really taking off. even the lowly $2 QFP IC3128 has support for eMMC.
l.