I was also thinking about buying a RPi 5 (or an OPi 4 Pro, but OS supports is too bad right now. It uses an Allwinner A733, the vendor image is on kernel 5.15 and no Armbian image in sight…)
and I would like run the system from NVME, so I came up with this list:
- Geekworm P579 case
- Geekworm X1001 PCIe to M.2 top (this one blocks the fan the least IMO)
- the actual RPi 5 of course
- 27W power supply, official one or 3rd party, ti doesn’t matter
- NVME SSD of your choice
Or if you don’t like this case, there is also the Argon Neo 5 with integrated M.2 slot, but it blocks the GPIO. You could fiddle some cable through the ventilation holes, but IDK, it seems easier on the P579.
But it’s worth checking out Geekworm anyways, they have a lot of hats (e.g. PoE, PCIe to SATA, USB hubs, CSI to full-size-HDMI in- and output and also matching cases for each of these hats!)
I also thought about a CM5 with some nice IO Board, but it’s cheaper just to get the regular RPi 5 with hats/tops.