Copying to a new HDD: Okay, I managed to do it, but it’s a pain.
When I first got my quad-tuner Tablo, I mindlessly grabbed a disused 500GB hard drive, threw it in a an disused powered USB enclosure and plugged it in. It was immediately recognized and formatted with no difficulty, but little did I know at the time how picky Tablo is about hard drives. The performance of the drive (a Maxtor MaxLine Pro 500 3.0Gb desktop-workstation class drive in a SIIG USB 3.0 enclosure, btw) was unexpectedly sub-par, but it did work. The main limitation seemed to be that throughput was so limited that I couldn’t record more than two shows at a time, even though I had a quad-tuner. I was able to live with that, with the expectation that I’d soon be swapping out the 500GB drive for a larger one in the near future.
Then the other rude surprise; there’s no built-in way to transfer content from one drive to another, even though there are two USB ports provided. I had fully expected to be able to plug a newer, larger (and more compatible) drive in, and then be offered a prompt like “Would you like to copy your content to the new drive?”. I consider this a major omission for a consumer-ready product. After all, hard drives do not last forever, and it’s inevitable that one is going to fail, or users are going to want to upgrade their capacity when they figure out how quickly HD content sucks up mere gigabytes.
Well, it did come to pass that my 500GB drive started to fail. So I acquired a “Tablo approved” WD Elements 2TB drive as a replacement. I then set out to transfer the contents of my old drive to the new one with the following procedure:
First, I plugged the new drive into the Tablo, and allowed Tablo to format it. After formatting, I connected both drives to my WindowsXP test rig and installed the Ext2 Linux volume manager. Both were immediately recognized by Ext2, and assigned drive letters. I copied the entire contents of the “rec” folder from the old drive to the new one. This took some time, since the old drive would experience read failures every hour or two, and I’d have to figure out where it stopped, and manually restart the copy procedure from there. (Content is stored numbered folders of 5 or 6 digits) Because of the stop-start nature of this operation, it took the better part of a week for me to get a complete copy. I estimate that had it not been for the repeatedly failing drive, the copy procedure would have likely been completed overnight.
After all sub-folders of the “rec” folder were copied, I plugged the new drive back into the Tablo and fired it up. It’s worked flawlessly ever since, and the WD Elements drive appears to perform much better than the previous drive.
IMHO, in its current stage of development, I can’t consider Table a “ready for prime time consumer product”. Architecturally, I believe it to be an excellent concept. (Multiple inexpensive clients networked to a single DVR server) They had the foresight to include two USB ports, suggesting the intent to support more than one hard drive. But having to resort to hacking skills to deal with this inevitable problem makes it hard to recommend this device to mere mortal users. And with 4TB drives now becoming common, a 2TB limitation is so 2012.