This paper describes an open-source SATA host bus adapter (HBA) for FPGAs, which makes it easy for FPGA-based applications to directly interact with permanent storage devices. This allows reconfigurable computing devices to be used in new applications that require bulk storage and presents additional opportunities to increase performance, reduce power consumption and improve system integration. In addition to standard disk sector read/write commands, this framework also supports more advanced concepts such as native command queuing (NCQ) introduced with SATA II. We test the system with latest-generation SSDs and demonstrate the potential performance advantages and trade-offs of direct hardware access to bulk storage devices.