SanDisk's Optimus gaming SSDs cost up to $800 for Gen 4 speeds you can beat for half the price

SanDisk has launched its Optimus gaming SSD lineup for PC and console, and the pricing is genuinely hard to justify. These are Gen 4 drives with Gen 5-adjacent marketing, sold at prices that make little sense against the current market.

The Optimus GX 7100X is a PCIe Gen 4 M.2 drive rated at 7,250 MB/s reads and 6,900 MB/s writes. It lists at $800 for 2 TB and $1,580 for 4 TB. SanDisk is currently running a "sale" bringing the 2 TB down to $630 — which is still absurd when a 2 TB WD Black SN8100, a genuinely fast Gen 5 drive, is available for $386 during Prime Day deals. The GX 7100X uses TLC NAND and carries a five-year warranty, and it's officially licensed for the Asus ROG Xbox Ally — though a standard Gen 4 SSD works fine in that device anyway, so the license doesn't appear to carry any real benefit.

Then there's the Optimus GX PRO 850P, also Gen 4, rated at 7,300 MB/s reads and 6,600 MB/s writes. The 1 TB model lists at $475, the 2 TB at $950. The current sale price drops the 1 TB to $380 — still more than double the $189 you'd pay for a WD Black SN7100 1 TB right now. The 850P is officially licensed for the PS5, comes with a chunky heatsink tuned for the console's thermal setup, but the PS5 accepts any 4-lane PCIe Gen 4 M.2 NVMe drive between 250 GB and 8 TB, so again the license is largely symbolic. Bizarrely, SanDisk's actual Gen 5 drive — the Optimus GX PRO 8100 — lists at $525 for 1 TB but is currently on sale for $350, making it cheaper right now than the Gen 4 850P at its sale price.

The most charitable read here is that SanDisk is front-running the broader memory and storage price surge driven by AI demand, setting inflated MSRPs now so future discounts look reasonable by comparison. Whether that strategy pays off depends on how fast the rest of the market catches up — and whether any gamer actually pays these prices in the meantime.