pazzoide

@pazzoide Are you sure your fan needs 3.3v?
if you want it to be controllable you'll need a pwm fan like this one:
https://www.amazon.com/GeeekPi-Raspberry-Controllable-Adjustment-40x40x10mm/dp/B092YXQMX5/
Or a transistor and resistors.
 
The way I did was using a pwm fan (3 pin)  and editing the dtb by making a patch with some lines copied from Radxa. Although it does only trigger the fan at a certain temperature, it doesn't regulate the speed as it should, it's missing some lines that were later added. I'll make a new one soon.
The pwm fan in this dtb is set at pwm13 and triggers the fan at 60C , pwm13 has to be enabled with the overlay.
 
The thermal policy has to be on step wise, you could check this with:
cat /sys/class/thermal/thermal_zone*/policy
 
If it's something else you could set the following line in /etc/rc.local before the last line (exit 0):
echo step_wise > /sys/class/thermal/thermal_zone*/policy
rk3588s-orangepi-5.dtb orangepi-5-pwm13.dtbo

I would guess too that you need to erase SPI.

For me this video was very helpful 
 
It also covers how to erase SPI flash and initialize it again. 

Or you can read the orange pi 5 manual https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1Bre2q0bGgXQuQlYaYDMvwstpvtHLmcgX  it covered also the MaskROM recovery steps in case you cant boot from any media anymore.

@Avatar Ng you should burn https://github.com/orangepi-xunlong/orangepi-build/blob/cf2eec97c417a513d30ca8c65f10ac35f48c07ef/external/packages/bsp/rk3588/usr/share/orangepi5/rkspi_loader_sata.img instead of using armbian-install. I'll make a post about ssd installation guide, soon.
 
@mrkev no i didn't test it due to i don't have CEC drive but i'll check it, thanks

I have exactly the same need, except I am looking for two identical boards : it is my KISS (*) version of a cluster of application, storage and backup server with disk redundancy. One application and storage online server and an other offline backup/archive server with the same content + the archives. So I can switch the boards in case of failure or restore the content of last day in case of file loss.
 
I use two BPI M1 at present - one having lost its USB ports. One SSD for app and one bigger HDD for bkp. 
So ? SATA is "has been" and is over-performed my new standards but it fulfill my present requirements, and it is a cheap and conservative solution. TRS-80 is wright : the best is to use USB3 and a converter (you will experience a huge improvement comparing BPI), so you are not limited on the choice of the boards and will continue to use the disks for years. Just, some return of experience will be valuable for choosing one : for my desktop, I buyed a uASP able JMicron controller which is allegedly not compatible with a via controller and seems a bit power hungry. 
 
So any modern Rockchip 64 bits, reasonably priced fanless boards that do not consume to much power would do the trick for me. (2 boards and 2 "good" adapters). And with OS on disk, no need for eMMC. 
 
(*) KISS : Keep it simple stupid. Security is antinomic with complexity. And when you experience a hardware failure many years after having put in place the machine and forgotten everything about how it works, the last thing you need is complexity and deprecated, out-of-date, not retro-compatible or not replaceable software or hardware.

Generally speaking, there are several boards meeting your requirements, as "server" use-cases (as opposed to "desktop") have been much better supported for a much longer time now.  I used Cubietruck for such tasks for very long time (and still do) however there are better boards available nowadays for actually even less money (read on).
 
Now to specifics, I used to think SATA was necessary, too, until I read this glowing review of particular USB to SATA adapter by tkaiser (from 2017!).  Surprisingly, this device is still available here.  I have several of them and they have worked well for me.
 
If you are willing to consider such adapter (instead of strictly sticking with SATA requirement, which as you noticed is more rare), this of course open up the possibilities a lot.  When I needed to buy another little "server" board a year or two ago, I chose ODROID-XU4 at that time which are (like Cubietruck) still 32-bit, however still quite powerful with a lot of CPU and USB3 and RAM, etc. and can be had for ~60 USD these days.  Other than the adapter caveat, this meet all your requirements and I think you might be happy with, I know I (and others) have been.  I think they went down in price because they are "only 32-bit" however this means (to me) just a good deal to be had (maybe?).    To make "apples to apples" comparison, you will need to add the price of PSU, eMMC, SATA adapter, etc. to that figure, though.
 
And that is where I personally am at, currently.
 
Now going forward, there are a lot more newer and more interesting boards, especially some of RK3399 (64-bit) based ones as Werner brought up.  One of these will probably be my next purchase at some point.  They will cost a little more (I think?) but as always, add costs of PSU, flash (eMMC or sdcard), etc. to get the full picture on any price comparison.  Some of RK3399 even support fancy stuff like NVMe, etc.
 
One final generality, I always recommend to stick to Armbian Supported Devices list as a starting point for any research.  But you probably know that already.    And remember, even some boards that look great "on paper" can have little gotchas, or be better for this use case or that, e.g., N2 have most raw power in CPU but is limited by I/O.
 
I learned that on some NicoD (YouTube) video, he has made some good ones, maybe you want to check them out.  He is focused more on "desktop" usage, but has a lot more experience with a lot more boards than I do, especially some of these newer ones and so I find his videos still very informative.
 
Let us know your thoughts more and how your research is coming along, if the right person see your post maybe they save you from one particular little problem or another.

Odroid HC4 would feature 2x SATA but no USB3. USB2 only
What about NanoPi M4V2 with 4x SATA hat? Powerful but more expensive

Both pictures show the tree lines, but the Banana Pi may have not used a UTF-8 font in his terminal-window?
The tree-view is enabled/toggled in htop with the lowercase Key "t" or F5
If you leave htop with F10 the current view will be saved ( with Ctrl-C it wouldnt saved)
With the uppercase Key "S" (or F2) you could enter the Setup-Mode of htop
 
"man htop" is your friend

you could set a UTF8 language in armbian-config at the SBC-side
and in puTTY terminal you could under configurations you could also set utf8
both together should show you the right screen in htop

hello pazzoide  still shows enough to help, why don't you try to change your htop version.

Type in the shell:
printf   "This is ASCII representation:\n|\n\`\n\`-\nThis is UTF-8 representation:\n\xe2\x94\x82\n\xe2\x94\x9c\n\xe2\x94\x94\xe2\x94\x80\n"
 
You should see this:
This is ASCII representation:
|
`
`-
This is UTF-8 representation:
│
├
└─
 
If you don't see the above representation, you should set UTF-8 for your language in Terminal.

htop was built without support for ncursessw (shared libraries for terminal handling (wide character support)).
I realized that is not the problem, i found out if you run htop from ssh terminal and from a console terminal you get ASCII on one and UTF-8 on the other (or vice-versa) and both have UTF-8 support.
Can you please check if you have the same behavior?  
 
 

RAM and compressed

Change back to the main server. apt.armbian.com

There will be more and more vendors using ARMBIAN as a reference because good support is one of the most important selling points. They will use "Armbian (will) support(s) ..." in their sales speeches even it's a complete fiction. Sales are not engineering
 
We can't do anything if they use that. A threshold for legal actions for abusing trademark is pretty high, it is a lot of work and it is not worth the troubles.

It's sad that they (and others) will just use this solo for their gain without asking and giving something in return.