IMHO, you’d be recording HD stuff… my MeTV doesn’t fit that.
I get by on my OG Tablos, mind you, they transcode to efficient streaming formats, with just 1TB USB bus powered drives. 4th gen since is stores (when not archiving) in native MPEG2 AC-3… it’s a lot “weightier”.
As for viewing, output is bottleneck to a USB 2.0 speeds. No performace can exceede one another like this.
Note, this “limation” has no impact on tablo’s overall performance including 4-tuner & Quad models.
My OG 2 tuner is going to be 9 years old in a few months. The 1tb (spinning) hard drive it’s using was a few years old when I connected it to the Tablo. Showing no signs of quitting. Tablo still is using the original power supply as well.
That’s funny…lol. No plans to record all of meTV. I do record lots of sports and movies and sometimes a bit of a hoarder but based on everyone’s feedback and input it sounds like 1-2TB should be plenty.
Thanks for the reality check.
There is more to performance than transfer speed. That’s why I wrote the word “responsiveness”. Latency is way better with an SSD, so Tablo might react faster when you start playback, or skip forward or back.
There’s some truth to this, but it’s funnels on funnels… so the if there’s a bigger bottleneck that isn’t solved by the use of an SSD, you may never really feel the latency improvement that much. As the world moves to “all SSD”, eventually, there will be no need of any discussion.
For now, it’s “either/or” (user’s choice). But with that said, without periodic trim, you might shorten the lifespan of the SSD. Have no idea if a periodic trim job exists on the Tablo though.
FYI - Tablo commented on TRIM in this post from 2019.
AFAIK, periodic trim is still “needed” to avoid starvation (in the case of deletes), since in depth knowledge of the filesystem isn’t known by the storage device independently of the OS. But, feel free to change my mind on that.
I am no expert on TRIM 
but even without it SSDs still have garbage collection and leveling processes. So if TRIM is not available it’s not the end of the world.
Here’s an excerpt from Samsung’s FAQs:
TRIM is a facility by which the OS can notify the SSD when data is either marked for erase or no longer valid.
TRIM helps to make Garbage Collection more efficient by preparing invalid data for deletion. When the OS “deletes” data, the data does not actually go anywhere.
The space in which it resides is simply marked as “free space” that may be used later.
By default, the OS doesn’t let the SSD know which data is now free.
TRIM allows the OS to inform the SSD which data is no longer valid, allowing the SSD to skip over invalid data when performing Garbage Collection.
Correct, but in terms of performance over time and wear issues, trim is still recommended. (there was a discussion of “performance” with regards to SSD)
Maybe Tablo will support trim functionality at some point in the future, but I suppose if we don’t have it by now we’re probably not going to get it. 
Learned allot from all the feedback and input and just wanted to say thanks to everyone that’s given their input.
Anybody know if the new 4th gen 4 tuner will have a USB 3.0?
This is just drive specs. Collectively in a tablo, (new and legacy) is limited to USB 2.0, for devices with internal SATA II. Networking in 100 Mbps Ethernet or 802.11ac. Rated network speed isn’t throughput, this can be a big variable for some, not so much for others.
There are performance differences between client devices. Often the “improvements” may be a matter of subjective perception.
It’s not a performance device. Yet seems to performs well with these antiquated specs. You can get an SATA III USB 3.0 drive… but the system doesn’t seem to have the headroom to get the maximum benefits. Other than just feeling that much better about things, maybe.
I’ve been using a 2TB Western Digital Elements HDD (powered via the USB port) for about 8 years on my original 4 tuner Tablo. The drive is still going strong.
The Tablo web UI is often painfully slow. With 10 people in the house, there are huge numbers of scheduled recordings and it is normal for all 4 tuners to be recording at once. (We tend to only use the Tablo apps for watching sporting events and other live TV. We mostly watch other content via our Plex server, to which content from the Tablo is copied using Tablo Ripper.)
I’ve just, today, swapped the 2TB HDD for a 2TB SSD and there is a noticeable improvement in the responsiveness. However, it isn’t so much faster that I’m ready to dedicate an SSD to the Tablo long term. The improvements I see could be due to the SSD being faster than the HDD but may also be due to the attached drive now being empty. I’ll have to use it more and wait until we fill it up to see if there’s sufficient performance improvement to permanently replace the HDD with an SSD.
Interesting discussion. I can’t speak to the choice specific to Tablo, but can say that I’ve moved to USB 3.0 SSDs for all purposes where I have any interest in transfer speeds. Everything I’d previously have stored on HDD I now rely on the cloud. I’ve had more than a dozen HDDs fail - most after many years of use, but a fair number within 5 years. I’m lucky and have never had a SSD fail (yet… it’ll eventually happen). A couple of HDD failures were even my fault… drops, etc. But I’ve dropped a few SSDs too. Much better outcome.
It’s not an expert opinion but just as a heavy user, I expect that any HDD is about as vulnerable, timeline wise, to hardware failure/wear as an SSD is to issues related to write limits.
If you really think you need 8+ TB of recording space, perhaps consider SSD for recording and cloud or NAS for medium to long-term storage. In your case, I’d opt for the 2 TB SSD, but probably pony up a little more for 4 TB.
any device with moving mechanisms will eventually fail. most HDDs can and often do outlast the write limits of an SSD by a very large margin.
@Barrabing
Honestly, you don’t gain any advantage real using an SSD with tablo devices. In fact you have the advantage of a longer lasting drive with a HDD(unless you’re prone to dropping them a lot). I know some will try to argue this but the life of an SSD is still much more limited than a HDD. I use SSDs on things like my operating system and games that don’t do a lot of writing to them. but not the tablo devices. what do you gain from an SSD? speed. the tablo devices(all of them) do not give you the speed advantage using an SSD(remember that all tablo devices use usb 2.0 for their storage(even the tablo duo and Quad use slower SATA for their internal port). HDDs are also still cheaper to buy than SSDs. oh and also keep in mind that it is very unlikely the Tablo devices will do any sort of maintenance on a SSD like trim or error correction.
also for size I think 8TB is a bit overkill. maybe 4TB to 6TB. but the size itself is a personal choice.
SSDs excel at random i/o. Streaming large files usually doesn’t fit that. However, if multiple people are watching different recordings, thrashing on an HDD could be a problem potentially, or if some are watching while a recording is happening.
So, from a strict performance (MB/s) point of view, it matters not. But there are cases where what is happening on the drive could drive that MB/s down very low on an HDD. YMMV.
The only thing that might make a difference SSD wise is if there’s lots of things to keep track of. But this will only affect drives without cache (most will have cache, be it SLC or DRAM/both). While a “problem”, the problem is tiny usually compared to the HDD issues mentioned earlier.
(btw, I use old Hitachi Touro HDD 1TB drives on my OG Tablo devices, no issues)
I never said you have any gain using an ssd over a hdd in the current 4th gen Tablo environment with the USB 2.0 being there throughput limitation for external drive access. I asked for feedback from everyone and did my own testing. I got a lot of great input and feedback from others in this forum and took that and with my own test results I determined what would work best for my household.
Actually, I said that my testing showed that there was virtually little to no difference between one over the other and that is why I personally decided to go with a 2TB Seagate HDD after testing and the cost difference ($65-75 for 2TB HDD and between $175-200 for a 2TB ssd).
As a matter of fact, I like my 2TB Seagate HDD for several reasons:
I agree with you on how and when to best use an ssd from my research, but I’m sure there will be many others who will disagree. I use ssd’s for similar uses as you do. I have many hdd’s (some over 20 years! Now I’m showing my age) and I haven’t had one go bad yet.
Appreciate your response and I hope everyone does their own testing and determine what works best for them and utilize all the great input and feedback that others provide in this forum to help in making the best decision that best meets their needs.