The first thing to look for is good design & software support and the availability of reference designs. The SoC designs I do tend to use SoCs from NXP and TI for that reason. Forget about Qualcom or Broadcom unless you want to do >100k units. You won't get any information. Where the likes of Rockchip and Allwinner fall short is lack of information needed to develop hardware and software. Another thing to look out for is guaranteed part lifetime. If you design an industrial product it is reasonable to assume you need to be able to supply it for a decade. TI and NXP can give such guarantees. And you'll need a decent PCB design package. Forget about Kicad. I'd rate Altium on the weaker side of things. Going for Orcad PCB designer is a better option as it has better support for doing high speed routing, impedance / crosstalk simulation and dealing with delay constraints.
Sata may be hard to find as storage is either eMMC or PCIexpress based nowadays. For example: NXP's iMX8 was introduced 6 years ago and it doesn't support Sata at all.