Are you about to max out your PS5’s SSD? You have a few choices: either start deleting some of these meaty RPGs, pronto, or get used to paying the kind of money that SanDisk charges for its new officially licensed storage expansion drives.
The Optimus GX Pro 850P NVMe SSD is one of a number of new SanDisk drives that have been renamed from the previous WD_Black naming convention. Designed with the PS5 and PS5 Pro in mind, it comes in 1TB, 2TB, 4TB, and 8TB variants, with the top-end model priced at a truly exorbitant $2,960. And according to the SanDisk website, it’s actually the reduced price, down from its regular price of $3,700. To put that into perspective, that’s currently over 3x the price of a PS5 Pro in the US, which already includes a 2TB SSD out of the box.
Even the $760 2TB model (was $950) costs over $100 more than the standard PS5 with disc drive. The Optimus GX Pro 850P is a PCle 4.0 drive with read/write speeds of 7300/6300 MB/s and a heatsink design. These specs make it eerily similar (if not completely identical) to the WD_Black SN850X NVMe SSD that the 850P appears to replace, and it didn’t take me long to discover that the 8TB model of the old drive was on sale for less than $600 last year.
As a reminder, the Optimus GX Pro 850P NVMe SSD is launching in the middle of a global memory crisis, and the prices above should give you an idea of just how out of control the RAMpocalypse is currently. As Digital Foundry Note: A $3,700 sale price for SanDisk’s new SSD that brings it down to the rough $600 figure its predecessor has been setting over the past 12 months would be a hilarious 84% discount.
Price hikes are unfortunately all the rage in gaming hardware at the moment, with the volatile economic landscape and AI-driven component scarcity being the cause every time. A few months ago, Sony increased the price of the PS5, PS5 Pro and PS Portal, after Microsoft did the same with Xbox consoles twice in 2025.
Nintendo held out longer than most, but last month it raised the price of the Switch 2 by $50 in the US, with the new $500 price set to take effect in September. And the most dramatic hike we’ve seen is in Valve’s Steam Deck line, with prices increasing by up to $300 for the 1TB OLED model in May.
