It really isn't about what you can afford, it's about what you can do. If you're on a laptop with an SSD, you have 128GTB, maybe 256GB if it's a new one.
Sure that's enough for now.... but what's this 2TB you're going to plug in to your laptop and how is it going to work?
You can't really compare the size of the blockchain in many years to hard drive sizes today...
Anyway, with Armory storing its data on disk, you can run Bitcoin on another computer, so you're back to just 1x block data on your laptop.