Is anyone using an 8TB hard drive with the 4th Gen Tablo?
I have been using an 8TB hard drive. I need to do some more testing but it appears the Tablo or Tablo App on Roku cannot handle a large number of recordings on the 8TB hard drive.
The Tablo and Roku stopped connecting about 7 months after I set up the Roku, Tablo and 8TB hard drive. They started having trouble connecting about 4 months after setting up. Until yesterday I had 7.2 TB of recordings and the Tablo and Roku would not connect. I had a continuous “Tablo - Connecting to Tablo” screen every time I started the Tablo app on Roku. Yesterday I deleted 3.7 TB of recordings brining the used space down to 3.5 TB. Now I see that screen for literally a second then the Tablo and Roku connect. I need to check this for a few days to see if everything works as it should to verify my theory.
My theory is that about 4TB the Roku and Tablo have trouble connecting due to the large number of recordings for some reason. After 4TB of recordings the time it takes for the Roku and Tablo to connect gets longer. Eventually the amount of drive space and number of recordings get large enough that the Tablo, Roku, or Tablo App cannot handle it and never connects. I am leaning toward the App being the problem because there is no problem with the phone Tablo App. Just a problem when using Roku and the Tablo App with 4th Gen Tablo and 8TB drive configuration.
Has anyone seen anything similar to this situation?
I am using a 2TB external drive with no troubles at all. I have to wonder if your problem is less about having an 8TB drive and more about just how full it is. Tablo does need a bit of working space on drive and having it so full limits that.
Also, I’m curious what kind of external drive you are using. I have a Western Digital 2TB Elements SE Portable SSD. With what I have learned since i bought it, if I had to do it over again I would not get an SSD, but rather a traditional spinning HD. SSDs are good for long static storage, but not as good for constant write-erase-rewrite cycles like a DVR requires when watching live TV. It can cause early failures. Not saying that is your problem, but it is worth considering.
As an aside, have you seen what is going on with the prices of SSDs!? I bought mine a year and a half ago and the price has doubled since then. My understanding is that the insane growth of server farms is driving up the prices.
I have a 4th gen and a legacy, both using 8TB WD Game Drive 5008s. The 4th gen has 5.1TBs and the legacy has 6.48TBs.
I started having the same problem on the 4th gen. I thought the same thing as you, so I started doing the same thing. I had almost 300 episodes of Death Valley Days, so I started there. I couldn’t go to TV Shows and access it from there because as soon as I did, it would crash. However, if I picked an episode from Latest, I could access System Information from there.
I couldn’t delete all the episodes at once, but since I was laid up at the time, I figured I’d go ahead and delete episodes one by one and see what would happen.
Low and behold, I got about 50 episodes deleted and the problem went away! I now have almost 400 episode recorded and no problems.
What I figure is that I somehow got a corrupted recording and it was affecting everthing else.
Or, I could be totally crazy,
Just a quick note/reminder about the new Tablo Desktop Player app by @senke7su that allows you to batch download programs to save off to some other drive for future viewing outside the Tablo. It could help alleviate such issues.
I have the 8TB Western Digital Elements. It is an actual hard drive. I bought the WD Elements at the time I bought the 4th Gen and Roku because the WD Elements is the HDD recommended on the Tablo site.
The reason I got to 7.2 TB used on the drive is because when it started taking 30 - 45 minutes for the Roku and Tablo connect we stopped using it. But we forgot to stop the scheduled recording of TV shows. At some point I remembered and went to the phone app and stopped all recordings.
Between about April and July last year I would go to the Tablo to try and figure out what the connecting issue was. So it was about July the Roku and Tablo stopped connecting all together. @papagnome you are probably correct that it could be the number of recordings. That would explain why after about the first 4 months the connection issue started getting longer and longer as time went on. I also agree with @KGBnut that getting close to a full drive could add to the problem. We learned that with the Legacy Tablo we have had for a few years and still use. The first time the external drive with the Legacy Tablo got pretty full we started having random issues and I told my wife to get rid of some recordings. It has worked fine ever since and we keep the drive space about half or so. I think that drive is a WD SDD 2TB.
Thank you for that info @wysiwyggin ! I probably saw it in one of the other posts and forgot.
I might give that a try. My wife intended to save complete series of TV shows we like. So yeah, it might help alleviate my issue. In the past she bought DVD sets of shows like Friends and Seinfeld and such. I’ve told her hard drives don’t work forever and her idea is risky.
I’ve noticed that my Tablo crashes when I try to play an episode when it is one of 150-200 recorded episodes in a program. I’m using a 5 TB WD Elements drive and a Google Streamer. If I continue to try to play this episode, a screen pops up and it says the Tablo is not connected.
The hardware if the 4th gens is pretty weak FWIW. It really doesn’t have a lot of processing power and as far as I can tell probably only 1 GB of RAM. For most users/use cases, this is more than sufficient to run a couple streams and manage a TB or two of recordings, this also helped them reach the low price point (half the price of the legacy models).
Doesn’t seem too far-fetched to me that it struggles loading/managing the database for 4+ TB of recordings. But have no fear, Tablo Desktop Player is here
I wonder if the Tablo (Gen 4, 4 tuner in my case) supports the trim function of an ssd. If not, the ssd will probably have an early grave, and writing after all pages (as they call it) have been used makes them extremely slow. I will probably stick with a 2TB powered HDD. Hmmm.
What I would like to know is what is the total number of recordings limit if there is one regardless of storage size. I owned a DVR that had a limit of 999 recordings so it made NO sense to get a huge hard drive as space was not an issue but number of recordings had a limit.
@Lenlabnj , here is sort of an answer to your question.
I have been working with support team for a very long time. I found the recording limit on my own two weeks ago. Yesterday I was asked by support to send the details of my findings so the support person I was working with could forward the information to the Tablo Q&A team to look at and investigate. The person got an immediate response saying they are aware of the issue and working on a solution for a future software release. They do not know when the release will be available.
Does anyone know if there is a page on the Tablo site that lists known issues and software bugs?
I ask because it is unfortunate that me and Tablo Support spent a few months and a lot of time troubleshooting the issue. Apparently Tablo Support was not aware of the known issue but the Q&A team was. It is really unfortunate for many reasons but mostly because my Tablo became completely unusable 7 months after I set it up. That was July last year.
We’ve been digging into the reports of users having difficulty accessing series with several hundred recordings. It’s something the product team is working on and a potential fix is being tested now. The only physical limit to how many episodes of a show your Tablo can hold is your storage space.
The only limit I’ve seen is 8 TB but I’m still having crashes when I try to watch one of over 100 episodes in a program with my Google Streamer. My 5 TB drive has 2.1 TB used.
