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.
Multi-core CPUs were still starting out to be fair, but they were definitely at least somewhat mainstream by the time of the 360/ps3. The 360 was tri-core, and was considered easier to develop for since all three of those cores shared resources. Meanwhile, the cell architecture is hard to develop for even by modern standards. As such, most games only made use of the PPE and left the SPE alone.
On the one hand I think it’s kinda just the natural progression of things. The reason we haven’t been feeling the need for huge storage is because hard drives underwent a huge boom that rapidly outpaced our memory needs. Like even 10 years ago, 1TB was pretty much the standard, and kinda still is. We also used to have optical disks that most of the game data would just live on.
On the other hand, there is no reason for a remake of a PS2 game to take up 70 gigs.