Drive full error, only it’s not

My Tablo Quad on firmware 2.2.38 is reporting a full drive, despite me deleting hundreds of recordings. I’ve rebooted it twice, but it still reports a full drive.

Is there an easy way to clean the cruft off of the drive?

EDIT: I ended up pulling the HDD and testing it: Bad sectors and unrecoverable errors. Heat is a real issue with this device as this is the second HDD that’s failed.

When you do a massive bulk delete, it can take a bit for the app to report back the new correct storage space available as deletion will happen in the background.

Does your Tablo still report a mostly full disk?

Still full. It’s been 24 hours. I can’t even watch live TV anymore.

If you send our team a ticket, we can arrange for a remote access session to see if we can determine what’s causing this.

I ended up pulling the HDD and testing it: Bad sectors and unrecoverable errors.

This is the second time I’ve had to replace a hard drive in 5 years. Tablo should really consider putting a cooling fan in the Quad.

Aren’t you using an external HDD? If so, what would putting a cooling fan in the Tablo do to solve the problem?

Why would I use a slow external HDD when I can use a fast internal one?

What model of Tablo do you have? When you said 5 years I assumed you meant on OG Tablo as the Tablo QUAD that has an internal SATA drive connection was announced in 2019.

A Samsung T7 SSD is a good choice (albeit a little expensive), it’s an external (USB) but a fast cool running drive that can be jostled with no head crashes! :slightly_smiling_face:

I used a T5 (previous model) for a while and really liked it (still have it), here’s a pic to get an idea of the size.

The highest recording quality is 10 Mbps. So if you could simultaneously record 4 programs and playback 6 recordings what would be the maximum HDD needed to support that configuration. And wouldn’t that HDD speed be about the speed of HDD drives from around the year 2000.

Five years was a guesstimate. I don’t really remember when I purchased the Quad, but my point is that this will be the second HDD I’ve installed since I’ve had it.

Poor cooling is a thing, as others on the Tablo forums and on Reddit have mentioned.

The Quad comes with a built-in SATA port that Tablo says I can put my own HDD in. The whole point of an internal HDD is so I won’t have to bother with an external one and it’s associated cabling. Why would I not use the port designed for a drive that Tablo says I should use? That’s like buying a refrigerator but using a styrofoam cooler on the counter instead.

And it’s not the speed of the drive, but the speed of the USB bus. The SATA II bus with 3Gbps is orders of magnitude faster than a USB 2.0 bus with a real-world max speed of 400Mbps in one direction.

In any case, I’ve replaced the drive and the Tablo is now working normally.

USB 2.0 max is 480 Mbps. Of course it doesn’t really matter if the drive is 3 Gbps if the maximum that is pushed from and to the drive is 100 Mbps

Your original post didn’t indicate which Tablo model you had and since both Quad models support an external drive I was asking if you were using an external drive to clarify.

My comment in regards to an external drive not being directly impacted by the temperature of the Tablo itself (assuming that external drive isn’t directly sitting on the Tablo) is still a valid comment.

I remember seeing a photo of this in the forum a long time ago, so it is definitely something that might happen.

I agree that an external drive wouldn’t have a temperature problem. I only want what I paid for and what was advertised. Don’t give me a feature and then tell me to not use it. Either drop the feature or make it work consistently and reliably.

If Tablo were to announce that they are recommending people use external drives on this particular model and stop including the SATA connector until a product revision comes out, I’d be 100% cool with that. Engineering is hard. I get it.

But don’t tout the feature as a selling point when it’s not as close to 100% reliable as it can be. My Quad has a molded-in fan bay. The fan was there. Tablo removed it and said it isn’t necessary.

I’m not trying to put Tablo down or say that the device is bad. I think my Tablo is great! I just want Tablo to own the problem and either acknowledge it and offer mitigation suggestions, or revise the product and correct the issue.

You’re right about using the internal drive, when I got my quad that’s the way I installed it. An external USB would have worked, but it’s so much cleaner with the drive inside.

Different internal drives generate different amounts of heat. I’m sure you read the various HDD/SDD reviews and forums and picked one with low heat.

My Quad has a molded-in fan bay. The fan was there. Tablo removed it and said it isn’t necessary.

What makes you think that tablo had a fan and removed it? Do any of the FCC certification pictures show a fan? These are common product shells designed and mass producted in China. Who knows why there appears to be a molded area. It could be for a completely different product.

Maybe Tablo should publish a list of recommended HDDs? That, of course, would be a TERRIBLE idea, as it indirectly makes Tablo liable for HDD failures.

And I will have to retract my statement about Tablo putting in a fan originally. I misremembered from reading the pages and pages AND PAGES of Tablo community forum posts about how the Quad overheats.

But my original point still stands: The Quad has a problem with overheating. I’m not the only one with this issue, as other posters will corroborate. A customer shouldn’t have to research a storage device for a consumer product. It’s not like people are putting in 10k RPM SAS drives their Quads.

Laptop drives are designed to run cool and with as little power draw as possible. Sure, I can put in a NAS drive, specifically designed to handle higher temps and more activity, but Tablo needs to be the one telling me that, not a random person (no insult intended at all) on a community forum.

If Microsoft released an Xbox that needed to be oriented in a different position than the one it was designed for, or needed an external drive because the internal had a risk of overheating, there would be howls of protest from the gaming community and there would be an eventual fix. Remember the “red ring of death?”

I’ll still recommend Tablo to my family and associates. I think it’s a great product. But I will warn them about possible overheating issues before they make their purchase.

This topic was automatically closed 365 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.