No. SATA/PATA/IDE bus allows only main bus controller to be the bus master, just like USB/SPI/I2C. Devices connected to those buses must be pooled by the system

No. SATA/PATA/IDE bus allows only main bus controller to be the bus master, just like USB/SPI/I2C. Devices connected to those buses must be pooled by the system, they cant initiate transactions on their own. On the other hand you have PCI/PCIe/FW/Thunderbolt/SCSI, those buses allow every device to take over as a temporary bus master, and some of them (Im not familiar/sure about scsi, probably not) allow arbitrary memory access. So you cant use SATA in a way FW can be exploited. There might be some obscure state machine bugs in some hardware host implementations, but why bother when you have low hanging fruit of access to raw binary data. Travis Goodspeed demonstrated (using usb storage, same mechanism) how analysis of read access call order and frequency patterns can be used to estimate OS and use scenario (boot, normal execution, forensic imaging of the drive). Thus infected device can pretend to be fine when analysed standalone.