As somebody who committed to the Tablo product line well before it actually was officially released, and have purchased three Tablos myself, the first in November 2014, and recommended it to countless family and friends who then went on to buy their own units, I have to say that one huge problem has remained an issue for me throughout my seven years of ownership.
The firmware and app software has been a continuing source of owner frustration. Having lived through every single release of updates of both server firmware and client app updates for Roku, Apple TV, IOS,and Nexus players, from the very beginning, there has been a pretty deadly combination of software bugs, insufficient testing, and dismissive blame of the victim. I never cease to be astonished when the words “alleged” “coincident” and “suddenly” fail to acknowledge legitimate customer complaints which all occur “suddenly” because a poor update is “suddenly” released.
There is a reason I have not posted here in at least a couple years, since there were no such problems, Only when “suddenly” an “alleged” problem in the firmware update turned both of my Tablos immediately into useless bricks Was it necessary to seek advice.
Since my previously originated thread complaining of this latest update was removed, and portions were merged with this thread, I wanted to report very positive progress solving the connection problem which many frustrated users are reporting. It is my hope that it may provide support people and consumers with some useful observations.
Below is my tentative but pretty likely solution:
I wanted to first say Thank you very much to all of you who have offered suggestions and assistance here. It is sincerely appreciated.
I’ve spent nearly a full day experimenting, rebooting, reformatting, et cetera. All of this has been in response to the firmware upgrade recently which took most of my DVR capabilities out of commission for a few days, as posted elsewhere on this forum.
What I ultimately learned was that my disk drives had both become corrupted/damaged, perhaps due to wear and tear, higher I/O traffic required by the firmware update, or some combination of both.
Even though reformatting the drives would temporarily recover some stability, the eventual “solution” was to put new drives into both of my Tablos. I have aggressively loaded both machines with very heavy work loads, using all tuners, doing a lot of shuttle fast forwards and generally high data rate activity. I am finally no longer seeing any connection problems, stalling, spinning cursor’s, or any error messages complaining of no disk space, no hard disk connection, player errors, etc.
My conclusion would be that marginal hardware combined with a more stress inducing firmware update caused my problems.
I have decided to add a third Tablo, and ordered it this afternoon. Operationally, it will replace my two tuner unit purchased in November 2014, with a quad tuner box with an SSD Samsung EVO 870 SATA drive. Compared to the SSD speed, I recognize that the peak demand for making or playing 4 simultaneous streams is orders of magnitude lower, but the low SSD SATA cost along with their low latency and no moving parts makes them an interesting alternative. Unlike some of my earlier experiences with SSDs, these drives, and especially the Samsungs, can write over 2 petabytes (2000 TB) before write “wear-out” is a problem. I also ordered a Samsung T7 USB external drive to be used on my older Tablo 4 tuner unit, just to see how it compares, and potentially enjoy the same benefits of the EVO SATA.
If my hypothesis is correct, and a marginal hard disk caused all of the totally disruptive “bricking” of my Tablos, when the update came along stressing them much harder, then I would suggest that future beta testing include a much wider range of older “compatible” discs, which may suddenly become Incompatible once the update is applied.
I will need another day or two to convince myself that the remedy I have described above is based on correct conclusions. I do think it is pretty safe to conclude that significantly increased disc traffic is at the root of this latest update kerfuffle.
great you’re able to be up and running (yes, tablo’s live tech support can be helpful but their restrictive contact time is a super PITA for too many 
)