I'm talking more so about HDDs, which were still very prevalent back then. SDDs wouldn't hit similar size to price for a few more years.

I had a mid-range laptop back then that was at least 500+ gigs with a HDD. And when I got my desktop, which was a hand-me-down 2012 dell inspiron from my grandmother, it had a 2TB HDD.

These days SSDs are fast and cheap, so the 1TB standard not really changing a ton has more to do with the switch from HDDs to SSDs.

I could be misremembering a few things here, so feel free to correct me.