Internal hard drives are much trickier to source and shop for than their USB-based external brethren. Speed, capacity, and durability are key, of course. But compatibility is the trick — external drives tend to be nearly universal, while internal ones are a little more finicky. The Samsung SSD 870 EVO earns its jaw-dropping 4.8-star rating by being compatible with almost anything with a 2.5-inch bay or SATA port, and the 2TB version earns its place in the deals section with a 55%-off offer from Amazon.
The 870 EVO reads at 560 MB/s and writes at 530 MB/s, which are the ceiling figures for the SATA 6 Gb/s interface. It won’t match an NVMe drive in sequential read benchmarks, but for the workloads SATA SSDs are actually used for — think OS storage in an older desktop or laptop, NAS array drives, or secondary storage in a machine that already has an NVMe boot drive — the 870 EVO is fast where it matters and never the bottleneck. Samsung rates this 2TB unit at 2,400 TBW, which puts its endurance well above what most buyers will approach across the lifetime of a typical system.
So Many Options
Compatibility is the other genuine draw here, and it’s the reason the 870 EVO holds up against newer options that trade raw speed for interface requirements. Samsung tested this drive against major motherboard chipsets, NAS enclosures, and video recording systems, so it drops into older machines and professional video setups without the compatibility research newer drives often require. It’s also backward-compatible with SATA 3 Gb/s and SATA 1.5 Gb/s interfaces, which means you can pull it from a current machine and move it into an older one without a separate drive housing.
Security coverage includes Class 0 AES 256-bit encryption alongside TCG/Opal 2.0 and Microsoft eDrive (IEEE 1667) support. Shock resistance is rated at 1,500 G at 0.5 ms, and the drive ships with Samsung’s Magician software for health monitoring and firmware updates.
Still a Winner
The case for a 2TB SATA SSD in 2026 is narrower than it was four years ago. Most new systems ship with NVMe slots, and the price gap between SATA and NVMe at this capacity has narrowed considerably. But the 870 EVO still makes clear sense in systems without an M.2 slot, NAS configurations that require SATA, and high-capacity secondary storage in setups where the primary NVMe drive handles the OS and the SATA drive handles media libraries, backups, or scratch storage. For those use cases, the 870 EVO at 2TB is still a better-supported and more endurance-rated option than most alternatives.
The list price, admittedly bloated by the worldwide run on memory from months ago, stood at $1,040. But at $467, this is the kind of drive you buy when you know exactly what slot it’s going into and what you’re asking it to do. The 4.8-star-rated 870 EVO at this price makes a strong argument for the right machine.
