I have not tested this yet, as I am working on the sernet stuff first, but...
The version of uboot we are using supports sata boot. Kind of.
You still need a microSD card that ONLY has uboot on it. Thus it can be a small, cheap, mSD card. You put all of your partitions on your sata drive and it SHOULD boot right up. I have tested this in F22, but I have not done it yet with the pre-alpha and my Cubies. I believe it works with the BananaPi as well (and other Allwinner SOCs with sata). You cannot put uboot on NAND yet, don't try until Hans reports he has it working, and he has higher priority work items. If you want to boot from USB HD, ask me, and I will send you the notes Hans sent me; he is open to someone else doing the little bit of work for this and he would see it gets upstream.
I have also ordered a sata multiplexer board that Hans uses. I want more than one sata drive on my file server. It also allows for RAID if that is your druthers. I will report when I get it working.
Finally uboot 2015.10 is wrapping up and it probably will include Cubietruck WiFi support. Of course you can add a WiFi usb dongle now, but it will be nice to be able to use the included wifi.