SATA on Stratix FPGAs

Hardware wise, SATA support requires at least 1.5 GBit transceivers and special out-of-band (OOB ) signalling features. Older Stratix GX devices have the GBit transceivers but not the OOB signalling. In addition, the SATA IP most likely hasn't been ported to these devices.

It might be possible to provide the OOB functionality by additional external hardware. In any case you need Gigabit transceivers (GX FPGAs). Apparently you have a Stratix device without GX blocks.

It should be noticed, that PATA-to-SATA converters are available as cheap plug-in adapters, so a SATA implementation in your FPGA design is not the only option to connect recent storage devices.