it's not an obvious question, so it's a good one. basically the low-cost
SoCs typically don't have SATA so can't even boot from it. the iMX6 is one
of the rare SoCs that actually supports UEFI... in a very weird way from what
i can gather...
anyway, with this computer, basically what you'd do is, plug in a USB-to-SATA
converter, put the SATA drive in that, then u-boot will recognise it as a USB
drive. then, you either put u-boot onto the NAND flash or onto a Micro-SD
card, that becomes your bootloader, and you configure it to boot from USB.
it's all fully-documented and perfectly doable.
links
https://github.com/linux-sunxi/u-boot-sunxi/wiki
http://linux-sunxi.org/U-Boot
