Reliable in what way? The Raspi 5 PCIe interface to NVMe is only a single gen2 lane (5Gb/s physical, 4Gb/s data due to 8b10b encoding) but that's still plenty

Reliable in what way? The Raspi 5 PCIe interface to NVMe is only a single gen2 lane (5Gb/s physical, 4Gb/s data due to 8b10b encoding) but that's still plenty fast for lots of uses. I've had no problems using a Samsung NVMe with a 3rd party NVMe hat for the past few months. You can boot directly from the NVMe so you don't also need an SD card.