In my case, i've never used SATA for the storage tier, I am using SAS, however there is a SATA drive (Dell 500GB magnetic) connected for use as the log/scratch disk since for me ESXi doesn't want that on my boot SD card. I was encountering hangs/PSODs instability from having this single SATA drive in the HBA config. A few weeks ago I rebuilt it all as RAID0 since I was also noticing that HBA mode was noticably slower in benchmarking than RAID0, although this may have been fixed since firmware 25.3.0.0016 wasn't released yet.
Just a pain since I've rebuilt the VSAN twice going from RAID0 to HBA and back and shuffling so many combos of HBA/RAID/driver/firmware settings. Still a great product, the only thing nagging me is not running in HBA which is why I'm interested if this is all fixed now. If so I'd rebuild again to HBA.