In December 2017 I wrote about the new model of 2 TB Seagate Barracuda drives becoming unusable for us because writing performance dropped significantly after a few seconds of continuous writing to them. We do a lot of this because there are several cameras on our measurement vehicles that write one picture every metre while we are doing road condition surveys at 80 km/h (that results in about 20 pictures per second). These new drives just were not up to that demand. Our guess was that it was caused by Seagate reducing the number of platters in the drives and adding some RAM cache to make up for it. This works mostly fine for normal office work where you rarely copy large amounts of data.
That problem disappeared because for whatever reason the old model reappeared on the market again. So for 2018 we could just buy that old model and everything just worked.
Unfortunately with the arrival of 2019 we are back to square one: The old model is only available in small amounts of remaining stock. We will test the new model again and see whether it has been improved, but somehow I doubt it.
EDIT: Our tests are done and the result is: The new 2 TB drives are as fast as the old ones. So, no worry. The only drawback is that they are smaller. They don’t fit as nicely into the drive enclosures as the old ones. On the other hand, that means they take up less space when stored.