Two terabytes is the tier where you stop deleting one game to install another. Single blockbuster titles now run past 100GB installed, so a 1TB drive carrying Windows, a creative suite and a handful of those releases is close to full before the machine has finished being set up. Most buyers on this page are replacing a drive that ran out of room rather than specifying a build from scratch.

The first fork is the interface. An M.2 NVMe drive slots straight onto the board and clears the SATA ceiling of roughly 550MB/s several times over, while a 2.5-inch SATA drive costs less per gigabyte and fits older desktops and laptops with no free M.2 slot. The second fork sits behind the controller: drives carrying their own DRAM cache hold write speed further into a long transfer than DRAM-less designs that borrow a slice of system memory instead.

One market note worth carrying into 2026: flash manufacturing capacity has been pulled towards AI datacentre storage and NAND has been in shortage as a result, so capacity per rand is under more pressure than it was two years ago. Evetech ships from its Centurion warehouse, with 1 to 3 business days to the major centres and 3 to 5 to regional addresses.