Sandisk Optimus GX 7100M NVMe SSD review – stellar storage at a high price

If you’re looking to increase the storage capacity of your handheld in 2026, honestly, you couldn’t have picked a worse time. Thanks to the ongoing crisis surrounding hardware components, particularly RAM, prices are high – thanks, AI. Still, that doesn’t mean you don’t have any options, and recently I was fortunate enough to receive the Sandisk Optimus GX 7100M NVMe SSD from the manufacturer. I don’t want to spoil the rest of this review here, but this SSD might be the perfect example of high quality with a high price point to match.

Let’s start with the positives. For me, the biggest highlight is that the Optimus GX 7100M is very easy to install, or at least it was with my Steam Deck OLED, which makes sense, as the 2230 SSD format is designed for handhelds and small laptops. As someone who’s not a very confident tinkerer, I’ve been putting off upgrading my Steam Deck’s storage for years, but now that I’ve done it, I’m wondering why I wasted that time. I imagine the same applies to any of the other PC picks from our guide to the best handheld consoles, including the likes of the Asus ROG Ally or Lenovo Legion Go. It’s about a 15-minute job, and honestly, the software side takes longer than the actual SSD installation.

With the SSD fitted, I went about installing some of my favorite picks from our guide to the best Steam Deck games, including Baldur’s Gate 3, a game with some notoriously long load times. This is where the Optimus GX 7100M’s fast read and write speeds, which are up to 7,250 MB/s and 6,900 MB/s, respectively, on compatible devices, kicked into gear, even if they didn’t quite reach those numbers due to the Steam Deck’s own limitations.

I noticed that loading screens were faster, often by a couple of seconds. Don’t get me wrong, they’re still not as quick as I’ve seen on a fully decked-out gaming PC, but for the Deck, they’re clearly better. Essentially, the enhanced storage is the big win, but the very subtle performance improvements are a nice bonus.

I had some initial concerns about battery life and thermal management, given the Optimus GX 7100M’s 3.5-4.0W power draw, but I need not have been worried. Thus far, I haven’t spotted any heat-related issues beyond what I’m used to with the Steam Deck’s default drive, even when downloading chunky files, and I’ve had no battery life issues either. As far as I’m concerned, that’s a win, as I’ve heard horror stories about Steam Deck users switching out components and tanking their battery life or having to invest in an external fan to keep things cool.

The last thing worth noting before we move on to pricing is that the Optimus GX 7100M comes with a five-year warranty, which I think is quite generous. Those five years equate to 600TB of writes per terabyte of capacity, so it’d be 1,200TB for the 2TB drive I’m using, but that’s probably only worth making a note of if you’re moving around some serious data – I doubt I’ll ever even come close to that number.

Now, unfortunately, it’s time for the price caveat, and it’s a pretty big one. The Sandisk Optimus GX 7100M NVMe SSD is expensive. The 1TB version starts at $229.99 / £205.99, while the 2TB version I’ve spent the last week or so testing is $449.99 / £409.99. For context, that makes this storage option cost about the same as a whole Nintendo Switch 2. I love having more storage to play with, but when it’s almost as expensive as a whole console, I’m not entirely sure I’d be willing to part with that sort of cash.

What’s worth pointing out, though, is that most of the alternatives aren’t much cheaper – or at least, if they were, they aren’t now. As we mentioned right at the start of this article, storage and RAM components are scarce and expensive right now, which is the reason we’ve recently seen a substantial price hike for the Steam Deck OLED, with a smaller bump in price for the Nintendo Switch 2 scheduled for September. What I’m saying is, you can’t blame Sandisk all that much for high prices.

If you’ve made it this far, my opinion is probably pretty clear by now, but I’ll lay it out simply: if you’ve got the money to upgrade your handheld’s storage, the Sandisk Optimus GX 7100M NVMe SSD is worth it. It’s a user-friendly storage solution, even for those who aren’t tech enthusiasts, beating most of the competition in terms of write and read speeds, without any issues in the efficiency department.