Customer Ratings & Reviews

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.

5 stars for speed, quality, and endurance specifications. Model Number: SDSP71100TAN-000E0 SANDISK Optimus GX 7100 NVMe™ SSD - 1TB Similar product to the 850X! 1. Fast transfer speeds to external USC C M.2 adapter 2. Four Minutes to back up an 850X boot drive (full Windows 11 Pro) to external adapter. 3. Five-year warranty 4. Complete printed manual online at SanDisk 5. Full specifications in the pictures with review. 6. No heat sink 7. Manufacturing Origins of SanDisk M.2 Components: SanDisk’s M.2 storage products — including SSDs and memory cards — are designed and engineered globally, with core components like NAND flash chips and controllers made in Taiwan and South Korea under SanDisk’s (now Western Digital’s) specifications. These chips are fabricated using advanced photolithography processes, often in wafer fabs in Asia, before being assembled into modules. Malaysia – used for assembly and testing of some memory products, including SD cards and USB drives, leveraging cost advantages and skilled labor. 8. Be sure to install the Dash Board APP at SanDisk to check FW. 9. This product appears to be supply chain stable for the time being. Final thoughts! This product is as good as all the great fast products in the past from these two great American owned companies. Nice to see this much progress in M.2 SSD chip supplies. Specifications Capacity 1TB Form Factor M.2 2280 S3-M Sequential Read Performance 7,250MB/s Sequential Write Performance 6,900MB/s Random Read 1M IOPS Random Write 1.4M IOPS Interface PCIe 4.0 x4 NVME 2.0 Dimensions (L x W x H) 3.15" x 0.87" x 0.09" Warranty 5-Year Limited Warranty Weight 5.8gms Model Number SDSP71100TAN-000E0 Operating Temperature 0°C to 85°C Non-Operating Temperature -40°C to 85°C

I have a Gigabyte Aorus Master x570 motherboard paired with AMD Ryzen 5900X. I already have two NVME drives installed in slot A and B. Checking online, slot C would only be PCIE 4.0 x2 at up to 3500 MB/s. Which is half of what this drive can do. So I had to decide on which slot to install it on. If I chose slot A, I would have to reinstall Windows 11 and all the apps and games. Or move my current data drive from slot B to slot C and install the Sandisk to slot B. I chose to do the latter. Windows picked up the drive no problem. It won’t show up in “This PC” or “My Computer” until you initialize it. You can do so in System > Storage > Disk & volumes, or search for “Initialize disk”. Make sure you select the correct one and format it. 1GB sequential making sure no cache I get 3769 MB/s write and 4023 MB/s. I used Powershell command with System.IO.FileStream class to run this test. I ran it a few more times. 3966/3667 MB/s and 4163/4055 MB/s. I Googled to see if copy files from one drive to this drive would be a good test. It says that Windows will heavily cache the file and will inflate results. The numbers are a bit on the lower side then I remembered that slot B is on the chipset and not directly connected to the CPU PCIE lanes. The bandwidth maybe sharing with other peripherals such as network connectivity, other SATA devices such as hard drives (which I have a SATA HDD), the other NVMe on slot C and USB devices. Although, I’ve unplugged all USB devices. But at 4000 MB/s read and write are great speeds in my opinion. Doing some research, application launches you won’t see a difference. Game assets load in small random reads around 4K-128K blocks and not sequential. I’ve reinstalled Officew 365 off my C: drive and installed it F: drive. I could not tell the difference. Most of the apps I use now are cloud apps also which definitely will not be impacted. However, transferring large files like 4K video if you’re editing can be a difference. But are you transferring over network? To another internal drive that’s on the chipset? USB or thunderbolt device? The speeds I’m getting are more than enough. This is a really fast drive. The numbers I shared are for comparison. For me, I cannot tell you any difference with opening apps on my C: drive (PCIE on CPU) vs F: drive (PCIE on chipset). I like this NVME drive.

One of the easiest ways to upgrade the storage on your gaming computer is to install a new NVMe SSD. Whether you are replacing the OEM drive or adding a new drive to an open M2 slot in your gaming system the Sandisk Optimus GX is one to consider. The Optimus GX is designed for gaming and it balances high speed performance with reliability. Note that this drive is thin and does not have external heat sinks which makes it more compatible with various thin laptops and gaming systems but it also could be an issue if its located near a high heat source. In my testing this Sandisk Optimus GX did outperform my OEM WD Gen 4x4 drive by as much as 25% on the CrystalDiskMark benchmarking app. However due to the high cost of storage these days it’s tough to decide if the improvement was cost justifiable over a slightly slower NVMe SSD. My gaming computer’s OEM drive was nearly full and it had a second M2 slot so I added the Sandisk drive to give me more storage. Installation: Installing an NVMe drive is simple if you have an open slot. You physically mount the drive and then use Windows Disk Management to get it recognized and formatted. Once it was formatted I used Steam’s settings to move my games onto the new Sandisk drive. Sandisk has a Sandisk Dashboard software app that monitors the health of the SSD. There is also the Acronis image software app that allows you to copy over an entire drive. This is useful if you are replacing an existing drive.

The SANDISK Optimus GX 7100 NVMe SSDs with PCle Gen 4.0 is the SSD that you need when upgrading or expanding your storage. Not only are you expanding your storage but you are also getting increased read and write speeds. SANDISK claims the Optimus GX 7100 NVMe SSDs can get up speeds of 7,250/6,900MB/s (1 TB and 2TB models) and they are pretty accurate with that claim. I installed the Optimus GX 7100 into my free M.2 slot, which was easy to do as these types of SSDs are plug and play. The only thing you will actually need (in my case) was a screw for the SSD. After installing the Optimus GX 71001 updated and formatted it using SANDISK's included software SANDISK Dashboard which also allows you to enable Game Mode. Game Mode enhances drive performance for gaming workloads. After installing the Optimus G 7100 I transferred my entire gaming library to the SSD and I was off and gaming in no time. My games boot up fast and l am happy with my choice of SSD. I would recommend this product for anyone looking to upgrade their storage.

Who doesn’t always need more, faster storage? I have large HHD storage capacities for archive and file storage, but I was seriously lacking in fast, SSD storage space in my editing PC. Plus there’s been this m.2 space just sitting there empty (next to the vacant RAM slot too) that I really wanted to fill. Now, this has NOTHING to do with the quality of this drive, but I swear, I’m never buying a prefab PC again. Times were tough, there was only one way to get a decent graphics card; buy it with the whole PC wrapped around it. But I won’t do it again! Every time I have to open this case up, nothing is as easy to get to as it should be. In this case, removing the aforementioned graphics card that I love was not as easy as most. Sure, just two screws and a PCI slot release…and 5 other tiny screws I definitely dropped into the abyss too many times, the front cover, 3 cable connectors and plastic tabs that are definitely broken now. The point is, if I’m diving into this case to add parts, I hope they’re worth it. And this drive was worth it. Thankfully M.2 installs are crazy easy but it was at that point that I put together that there is no heatsync or anything on this drive. I guess it’s not needed? My case, for all it’s annoyances, does have decent air flow though and I’m not that concerned with temps. Formatting was as easy and straightforward as any new drive install and I was up and running right away. I did a benchmark test for fun to see how much better this is than my smaller, older 500GB SSD to see just how much I may notice in speed differences. Apparently a lot. Faster read speeds and write speeds almost doubled. It’s just a better drive on all accounts. Now, that said, my older SSD is just that, older. I attached the screenshots of both drives, the more full/smaller capacity drive is obviously my older drive and the sandisk is the “S” drive that is empty. So far I haven’t had too much time to get a lot of real world use on the drive, but after I ran the tests, I started moving files from my old to my new and it seems to be working just fine and writing along. Having more space and faster speeds means my editing software can work faster, my gaming should run better, there’s no downside here. I think for the average, to slightly above average user who is doing a lot of gaming or creative work that requires above average drives, they won’t be disappointed with this drive. I just wish I went for 2TB or more. There’s never enough storage.

PC storage has become increasingly expensive and scarce thanks to the who AI boom that the world is experiencing. There is an increase in demand and the supply is lacking and unfortunately what is available is absurdly expensive, this has become a problem for consumers and businesses. Some companies have stopped catering towards the consumer market and decided to focus on the business sector in the pursuit of profit. SanDisk is one of the companies that has not abandoned the average Joe like myself. I am reviewing the SanDisk Optimus GX 7100 1TB drive. The 7100 is a full sized 2280 M.2 NVME PCI Express 4.0 While this means nothing to the average consumer it is a big deal to gamers and enthusiasts. I am a gamer and appreciate this drive and what it does. SanDisk offers an exclusive version of Acronis for image software. I declined to use that as I have my own Software Ease US Todo and I cloned my disk drive and replaced my old Samsung NVME. This is my fist PCI-E 4.0 drive so it was amazing to see just how much faster every little task is. I installed this in my main PC and it is for gaming, streaming 4K media on my home network and daily tasks. I do not have disk speed testing software but I do notice a significant difference in speed in everything I do, this is paired with a 12th gen Intel CPU & Nvidia RTX 4070 and 32GB of RAM. I booted up Cyberpunk 2077 as a test and the loading time was blistering fast in Windows 11 pro. God of War, Tomb Raider also loaded up incredibly fast without issue. I won’t speak about speeds because I do not have the appropriate software to measure this, however I will make note that this product is backed by a five-year warranty and is rated to last for 1.75 M hours. Overall if you are looking for a solid drive for gaming, media of whatever consider giving SanDisk a chance unlike another storage and RAM company that gave up on us consumers this is a solid device that does as advertised.

I bought this at Best Buy and had the resident Geek Squad install it. It was worked flawlesly so far and the internal transfer rates between the SSDs is fantastic. It saves me many hours of previously having to wait for transfers data between HDD. Highly recommend going SSD.

I’ve had an empty NVMe slot in my gaming desktop staring at me for months, and eventually I caved. More room for Steam games isn’t a bad thing, right? So I picked up the Sandisk 1TB Optimus GX 7100 NVMe, hoping it would give me some additional, fast storage for my games. Installation couldn’t be easier if you already have a free NVMe slot. It’s plug‑and‑play. The only hiccup, and honestly a bit surprising, is that it doesn’t come with a heatsink. For a drive that’s clearly meant to handle fast transfers and gaming loads, that feels like a big miss. If your motherboard doesn’t have built‑in NVMe cooling, you might want to pick up a heatsink separately to avoid any possible thermal throttling. That said, once it’s in, the drive performs really well. It’s not Sandisk’s flagship gaming model, but it’s still pretty fast, and in my basic Windows 11 tests it hit the advertised speeds without much trouble. For gaming, storage and video editing, this drive is more than adequate. Pros: -Easy installation -Fast drive that reaches advertised speeds in real world use -5 year limited warranty Cons: -No heatsink on a gaming focused NVMe is a shame Overall Thoughts: If you’re looking for a NVMe from a reliable company that stands behind their product with a 5 year warranty and that keeps up with all but the fastest NVMe drives on the market, then this Sandisk Optimus GX 7100 might be a good fit, just bring your own heatsink.

Bought this because my old hard drive was giving a SMART code. This one seems to be working very well and is very fast. Included Acronus download made the process of cloning my old hard drive very quick and easy.

I was running out of room in the 256GB SSD to the point of having 8MG to work with. The 1TB solved everything and I did not upgrade the RAM, 8GM was working fine and still is.

Your computer will start giving you warning signs that your drive is failing (for example, my antivirus scan had difficulty completing, corrupt updates, etc) before it completely fails. Fortunately, the Geek Squad team retrieved my data and replaced the drive. Now my computer functions as it should! Thank you Geek Squad!!!

Honestly, not much to say... it's a 1 TB SSD for a relatively cheap price (compared to others on the market). Originally wanted a 500 GB, but decided to upgrade to a full TB! Also, the speed difference was significant, as well! Especially when loading screens are active in games.

My previous SSD was going bad so I did some research and decided to buy this brand and make/model. Boy I do see where everything opens up a little faster. Despite the increase in price due to the memory/storage shortage, for its its worth the purchase.

Works as advertised. Throw it in, format it, it works.

The SD card worked as promised and was a great price for the storage capacity.