Is there a minimum length for SATA cables?
I have designed SATA asic serdes circuits and do not recall issues with short cables.
However, we do test for very long and very short length test cases to ensure sufficient signal integrity at either extreme, as sometimes a timing circuit or equalizer misbehaves when the signal is too clean.
For instance the timing recovery relies on a sloped transition between 0 and 1, and if the cable is too short, then the 0-to-1 and 1-to-0 slopes are too steep, and the timing recovery can become noisy (it's a long story). This can be an issue in asic test set-ups, but hardly in real deployments.
However, 12in seems to be a ridiculously high minimum.