Why does anybody make a new 1 or 2tb sata m.2 ?
My day job is working at a MSP covering small businesses, and I can assure you that plenty of businesses still have less than 1TB of data. 4TB and 8TB drives are great and all, but the size of a Quickbooks file, Excel document, PDF, and other such business items really hasn't scaled up as much as drive capacity (SSD or HDD) in the past while.
I actually just went and looked, and the average size of the offsite backup dataset for my clients has definitely gone up; in 2013 it was 541GB and as of yesterday it was 1438GB. While that represents a fairly large 2.6x increase in data, it still doesn't represent much given the 7 year passage of time. And my 1438GB number is also somewhat skewed by a handful of clients with much larger datasets (6TB+) that drag the overall average a bit higher.
You might also ask "why SATA"? And the answer to that is simple; it is cheaper, easier to connect, and lots of places do not need the speed. 95% of my small business clients still operate on 1 GbE networks, so why would you need NVMe on your file server if everyone is accessing it remotely via 1 GbE NICs?
I'm not trying to "make a case" for this drive, but there is a not-insignificant portion of the market that still hasn't even made the jump to SSD, let alone higher tiers of SSD. I can understand the intended positioning in the market. I just picked up a new client last week that bought a brand new Dell server in 1Q2019 that shipped with 2.4TB 10K SAS drives; I wanted to reach back in time and slap them for not getting SSDs.