SANDISK - 1TB Optimus GX 7100 PCIe 4.0 x4 M.2 2280 NVMe SSD

The Optimus GX 7100 is a new offering from SanDisk, long known for its reliable flash memory and professional storage solutions. Those of you familiar with the "color" series from a previous manufacturer will be familiar with the Optimus GX. It's gaming-focused but since it prioritizes power efficiency and snappy system responsiveness, it's a great fit for content creation and productivity, too. SanDisk is recognized globally for its accessible digital storage, and the Optimus GX 7100 continues that trend for PC gamers, laptop users, and system builders alike. Let's see how this freshly rebranded PCIe 4.0 drive stacks up against the competition in a highly competitive NVMe market. Overview and Specs =================================== SanDisk has a rock-solid reputation in storage, and the Optimus GX 7100 is one of their latest entries in the high-performance NVMe/SSD market. The "Optimus" design means it utilizes a DRAM-less architecture, intentionally relying on Host Memory Buffer (HMB) technology to keep manufacturing costs down and physical profiles slim. This makes it significantly more compact and compatible than bulky "heatsink-required" flagship drives that struggle to fit into thin laptops or tight enclosures. Priced as a premium mainstream option, you're getting a proprietary SanDisk Polaris 3 A101 controller paired with cutting-edge Kioxia 218-Layer TLC NAND flash. On all the marketing docs, SanDisk quotes sequential speeds of up to 7,250 MB/s for reads and 6,900 MB/s for writes on the 1TB model. You'll also find an endurance rating of 600 Terabytes Written (TBW), ensuring the drive can handle years of heavy read and write cycles with ease. Design and Architecture =================================== What's in the box? Not much, but that's OK... You'll find the drive itself, which you'll notice is a completely single-sided design. Because all the NAND flash components and the controller are packed onto just one side of the PCB, it maintains an ultra-thin profile. What this means for you is there's no need for worries or installation anxiety when upgrading a thin-and-light laptop, a small form factor (SFF) desktop, or wondering if this will fit your PS5! Note, there is no mounting screw included in the box, so hopefully your motherboard has one for each slot. Getting this drive installed is a straightforward affair, thanks to its standard M.2 2280 form factor. I've got plenty of spare slots in my older NUC, so I was done in 1 minute. Just slide it into an available slot, secure it with a single screw (that hopefully you already have!), power on and add it in Disk Management if you're using Windows. 1 TB ain't what it used to be, so I set it up as a single partition, replacing an older "green" series SSD that was focused on size and value, not speed. If you download the Western Digital/SanDisk Dashboard software, you unlock even more utility, including real-time drive health monitoring, firmware updates, and life expectancy metrics to keep your data secure. Performance =================================== When it comes to speed, the Optimus GX 7100 delivers a great experience with one pleasant surprise. In synthetic testing via CrystalDiskMark (a well-known, free benchmark utility), the 1TB model is a consistent performer in sequential reads, regularly hitting over 7,110 MB/s. Sequential writes fall right in line with expectations, landing around the 6,820 MB/s mark. Since it does not have a physical DRAM cache chip, it experiences a slight bottleneck during heavy, sustained file transfers, but its random low-queue performance outperforms many typical mid-tier devices. This was a bit surprising, to be honest. With DRAM-less drives, you're pretty much giving up any chance of matching flagship responsiveness, but the Random 4K Read speed (Q1T1) on this drive pulls a massive 101 MB/s. What this means to you is faster game loading and OS booting! I was worried about the performance without a heatsink and the fact that my motherboard didn't have one to use either. Even after hours of continuous use, the drive never broke 50°C! This great news for compact builds or thin and light laptops where there might not be enough room for proper SSD cooling or heatsinks. Summary ==================================== The SanDisk Optimus GX 7100 is a great gaming SSD and all-arounder for anyone who that needs a cool-running, reliable laptop or system upgrade. It’s optimized for gaming and power-efficient for all-day computing. There are no worries using this in a PS5 or space-constrained custom builds since the single-sided design is super-slim. If your days and nights includ gaming libraries, productivity suites, and working with large files, the Optimus GX 7100 is a great choice.

The box is small and clean. It's matte black with red circuit graphics running across the box. It has a diagram showing the lineup and it sits right below the top tier Optimus GX Pro. Inside you get a clear plastic clamshell tray and nothing else. It doesn't come with a screw but every laptop I've had has a screw in the additional SSD slot. The drive comes out easily, there's no frustrating blister pack to tear apart. - Design & Build - The Optimus GX7100 is a single-sided M.2 2280 board which means it houses all the chips, controller, and NAND on one side. The back is basically blank. This is a big deal in a laptop because we usually have a thermal pad on one side and a hard floor of the motherboard on the other side. This ensures everything sits flush. The drive looks minimal which I prefer, no heat spreader, and no RGB. - Performance - Installing it in my gaming laptop was about as easy as it gets. Open the back panel, unscrew the additional drive bay screw, snap in the Optimus GX, screw it down, close it up. Because it's single-sided the laptop's thermal pad pressed against the drive exactly the way it's supposed to. I set it as my D Drive with a GPT simple volume which gave me 931 GB of usable space to work with. I ran CrystalDiskMark like I usually do with new drives to see its performance. The numbers represent how it actually feels when I'm gaming. Sequential reads were 6,876 MB/s and writes at 6,617 MB/s on the big 1MB test, with the 128 K sequential run sitting right there at 6,820 read and 6,428 write. Those reads are a touch under the rated figure on the box, but that's what I expect from a real run inside a laptop rather than a lab benchmark. Any way you look at it, it performs very close to the theoretical max, impressive! Random performance gets more interesting. At high queue depth the drive scored 989MB/s random read, which is genuinely quick and explains why games load so fast and launching apps feels so responsive. For gaming and everyday laptop use this SSD gets it done. In actual daily use, this drive does what a good Gen 4 NVME should do, it's so smooth you don't notice it, and that's a good thing. Boot times are quick, Windows is responsive and gaming storage feels fast. After a long gaming session when the laptop starts heating up and the fans are ramping up, this drive holds steady. There's no stutter, or spike in load times. Power wise, it's not pulling power like the higher watt SSDs either. - Pros / Cons - * Pros * Single-Sided board does well with thermal pads and tight spaces * Strong Real-World Gen 4 speeds (nearly 6,900 MB/s sequential read in my testing) * Quick high-queue random read for fast games/apps * Runs cool * Power efficient * Suggestions/Needs Improvement * A mounting screw would be nice in case it's needed For a gaming laptop upgrade or additional storage the SanDisk Optimus GX 7100 1TB is a great choice. It's single-sided design and easy install gets you up and running quickly. Most importantly, it performs well on a high-performance gaming laptop, running cool even in those longer gaming sessions. I highly recommend it.

The Sandisk Optimus GX is the fastest rated PCIe 4.0x4 SSD that I’ve owned to date, and it meets that expectation with super fast transfer speeds, consistency, and reliability. I’m using it as secondary storage for games and backup purposes in a PCIe 4.0 slot, and the fact that it’s single-sided makes it slim enough to fit in my gaming laptop and still have enough room to add a passive heat sink sticker. Setup was quick and straightforward with a quick format and partitioning after installation. The drive advertises max read/write speeds of up to 7250/6900 MB/s and during testing, the benchmarking software results came pretty close to those figures. This drive does not have a DRAM chip and uses HMB to cache the mapping in your system’s RAM, however, the added latency is generally imperceptible during real-word use unless the drive is nearly filled to max capacity. The drive also employs SanDisk’s nCache which uses some of the NAND flash as an SLC cache for fast initial transfer speeds, however, write performance will slow to a crawl off once the cache is exhausted, for example, if I try to move hundreds of GBs of 4K video files to it, and the cache size dynamically scales with the drive’s free capacity, so it shrinks as the drive fills up. To avoid these slowdowns I generally try to limit the size of data transfers to the drive by performing more frequent file backups, rather than copying over huge blocks of data all at once. For gaming use, it has more than enough storage space for numerous installs and load times on the games I played loaded from the drive were quick and seamless. It also has excellent power efficiency and runs cooler than my older gen SSDs, with idle temps measured around 30-40°C and 50-65°C during sustained peak writing and gaming, so I get more game time on battery power and less heat output. With a 5-year warranty and 600TB write endurance, I expect this drive to last a long while.

So hard to believe how tiny these drives are now, let alone how fast they can be too. This one is pretty much on par with another one of my “Pro” drives with my only limiting factor being my motherboard. For my system, it is a pretty easy snap in place and then snapping of the heatsink over it. It is highly suggested to have some sort of heatsink system for these types of drives as they get hot quick. Most modern motherboards have snap in systems, laptops even have smaller thermal pad type systems. But, if yours does not, look into getting something to help distribute the heat better as that can ruin your performance and lifespan of the drive. Once installed and powered back on I just needed to do a quick format through Disk Management on Windows and everything just works as expected. Having the extra space is pretty essential these days, but still surprising how quick you can fill up 1TB. There is a SANDISK Dashboard you can install from their site to provide more information about the drive, check firmware and enable game mode. Although, I personally did not see any real difference with that mode enabled as it was all just fast. A Crystal Disk Benchmark did give slightly higher random 4KiB Q1T1 read/write speeds than before enabling it, but slower Q32T1. But, only by about 10-25MB/s. Overall, this drive is everything it claims to be with speeds and performance with a 5 year warranty.

I have been using a 2TB Samsung Pro 980 for a few years now. It has been a reliable workhorse, but when it comes to flash storage, really anything flash, memory etc... it is always evolving into something better than the previous iteration. So I was excited to see if the new SANDISK Optimus GX 71000 was going to outshine ole reliable. TLDR, it did. One thing off the bat that I find interesting about the marketing for this SSD is that it seems to be targeted for mobile/laptop devices. However, I am running this in my custom PC build, and I could not tell a difference in performance. In fact, speaking of performance, that is where I was quite surprised with the benchmarking results compared to my Samsung. Here are the results using crystaldiskmark Sequential read: +15.2% faster 5,304 MB/s vs 6,099 MB/s Sequential write: +50.0% faster 4,325 MB/s vs 6,443 MB/s Random 4K read: +24.2% faster 372 MB/s vs 489 MB/s Random 4K write: +33.6% faster 404 MB/s vs 557 MB/s The sequential write was where I was quite impressed. I am going to chalk it up to their advanced NAND architecture and cache technology they have on this drive. Loading up games that are over 50GB takes seconds such as Fallout 4, Warzone, Oblivion etc... Overall this is a great drive with excellent performance in gaming. Boot times, loading screens, write performance, all excellent.