Hard disk upgrade considerations

I believe I am one of many who are planning to upgrade the hard disks on their TABLO. I would like to see a summary of what to expect during the process from TABLO Tech Support.

Some considerations might be:

01). My existing hard drive has recorded movies and shows. Would the recordings still show up as phantom entries when I install a new empty hard drive?

02). Will my scheduled future recording selections still be active when I install a new empty hard drive?

03). What is the best way to return the older hard drive to operational use with Windows as a backup drive? (Partition and formatting considerations).

Perhaps others might have questions on this topic as well.

Thanks.

They have answered all of these.

  1. yes they will, you can delete them though

  2. Yes they will, as long as you do not do a factory reset

  3. Format it as you would any drive :wink:

I do have one question. If I switch to a new hard drive, can I go back to the old hard drive to watch a show that was on it?

Obviously, I would need to be careful and switch back to the new hard drive afterwards, or any new recordings would go on the old hard drive. But does this work?

I have wondered that as well. We almost had an answer from @beastman at one point, but I don’t think he ever did answer it. He was going to try putting in a drive he had swapped out and try it.

If I don’t get an answer, I will try it myself whenever I get the upgrade.

That is interesting

Swapped but copied movies I wanted to keep prior to the swap.

I have to apologize for starting this topic. I found out if I performed a proper search I could find answers to my questions from earlier posts.

Anyhow, I plan to swap out a 2TB drive for a 5TB drive, both USB-3. I plan to use the procedure documented in the link below using the Ext2Fsd program to “clone” the 2TB drive to the 5TB drive. I’m hoping with both drives plugged into a USB-3 port the file transfer will be speedy. I’ll post back here how it worked. I’ll be transferring about 1.2TB of files.

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If you keep the entries for the recordings in your apps you can swap out the drives and still play the recordings. But you’ll need to be careful to swap the drive back out to your new one for recording new shows.

It could get quite messy if you don’t know which show is on which drive because Tablo doesn’t keep track of that.

Thank You.

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Is being able to have two USB drives connected at the same time in the “to do” list? I know Linux supports it.

It’s something that we have definitely considered which is why we added two ports in the beginning :slight_smile: