A few questions before I buy

General Discussion
1

Rid myself of DirTV in december and have been looking into any form of DVR to record all my shows again and narrowed it down to this and Simple.TV   Need to know a few things to help make my decision.


-  If I get a 2TB elements drive can I partition it and use 500gb for tablo and the other 1.5tb for net storage?
-  I know I can xfer shows to a device to watch but can I xfer a show to the drive to watch through tablo?
-  If I get the 4 tuner model can I effectively record 4 shows while the 3 of us watch 3 different recorded shows?
-  Is the ethernet port 10-100-1000 base?
-  Without a paid subscription I am limited only to 24hr recording? All other features are locked (stream to android, etc)?

Will probably think of more but those are in my head right now.
2
  1. No.  The Tablo will format the whole thing for its own use.
    2. The Tablo will only play back shows recorded on its own device.  
    3. Yes.  You could use every tuner at once, and recorded shows don’t use a tuner at all.
    4. 10-100 only
    5. The main limitation of not having a subscription is no guide data, so if you want to record any shows, you have to set up manual recordings.  Manual recordings are pretty flexible (daily, weekly, single event, etc).  You also don’t get Tablo Connect, so you wouldn’t be able to play any shows away from your home network.  But you can still stream to all your devices in your home network.
3

Just to chime in, the Ethernet 100 Mbps is fast enough to watch up to at least 6 streams at once so I wouldn’t worry about that spec.

4

Getting back to the drive partitioning. So can I add data to the drive after tablo has done it’s thing or will it overwrite anything on there it hasn’t placed itself?


And thank you both for your replies
5

You can’t add content that Tablo doesn’t record. There is a way to extract recordings from the drive, but no way to add video to a Tablo drive.

6

The drive must connect directly to the Tablo’s USB port. It won’t share it, it’s dedicated to the Tablo only, don’t remove it or mess with it once set up. Get a drive that’s approved and tested, check the specs and info here, and connect it, let the Tablo format it and leave it alone. Don’t remove it and mess with it, it’s got to be dedicated and connected direct. It’s not a NAS, not a shared drive in any respect. 
Why would you add data?

Won’t matter since you can’t access the drive from your network, only via Tablo.

I agree that 100Mbps on the wired Ethernet is plenty fast and that’s how I recommend you connect it - wired. 

If you have other recorded shows, let your BluRay or other device play them through the TV. Tablo isn’t a media server.
7

Why wouldn’t I add data? If I bought a 2tb drive I’d be lucky to ever fill 500gb with shows so I was asking to see if I could maybe save some money by only buying one drive to use for external storage. 

8

I think he meant why would you add file to the drive if you cannot access the drive after it is attached to the Tablo. You can use a smaller drive with the Tablo.

9

@Eric_V - Everyone has provided some great advice/feedback.


Here’s a few pages you might want to read as you complete your research.

On hard drives: https://www.tablotv.com/blog/tablo-usb-hard-drive-specifications-suggestions/

On what a subscription provides: https://www.tablotv.com/tablo-products/tablo-guide-data-subscription/

On tuners: https://www.tablotv.com/blog/tablo-tuner-math/

If you have any more questions, let us know.
10

@TabloTV the last link provided above has a space at the end of the url and that’s causing it to return a 404 error when you click on it.

11

I agree on buy the smaller drive. In fact it’s possible to buy two smaller drives for the same or less than a huge drive in SOME cases. Save your money, buy a 1t or smaller drive and then buy a drive for other use. Since you can’t access the drive outside of Tablo - (it’s NOT a NAS and the drive would not be available without removing it from Tablo and even then the formatting will be different), there’s no reason TO buy a big drive for Tablo. 

Besides, if you buy a smaller drive you’ll not even need to think about if it will work with the current Tablo kernel or not.
12

Plus not to mention all the problems we’ve seen on the forums with 2 TB drives.

13
@TabloTV the last link provided above has a space at the end of the url and that's causing it to return a 404 error when you click on it.

Fixed! Sorry :) 

14