Whenever I try to setup my tablo, it won’t let me format the hard drive. It gets to the screen where it asks me to format the drive, I type FORMAT into the dialogue pop-up and nothing happens. Has anyone else had this problem?
@TabloTV it’s a brand new sea gate backup plus 2TB drive. Works when I plug it into my computer. Any ideas?
@mdburges Could be that your drive is reporting the wrong sector size. Regardless of being well within spec and a recommended brand, randomly some drives report 4K sector sizes vs 512. There’s no way we’ve found yet to anticipate this but are working on having Tablo recognize these differently formatted drives.
If you contact support they can check on this for you, but the best option might be to try another drive.
@TabloTV thanks. I have emailed support. Do you think I could correct the issue by reformatting the drive with my Mac? What formatting settings would be best?
Mdburges, I am having the exact same problem with the exact same drive you have. Funny thing is when I first started it up I got the “format” thing and it just seemed to hang there so I went on and continued setting up the tablo, including upgrading the Tablo software. Ever since it doesn’t even recognize a hard drive is connected at all. I’ve tried re-formatting the HD on my computer. I only have two options to format, one is NFTS the other is exFAT I think. The later is the only one with the 512 file size so I reformatted it to that. Still didn’t see it. I’ve been going nuts with this, and I’m almost to the point of resetting the tablo back to factory defaults and starting over, but I haven’t done that yet.
Well I gave up on the seagate and went and pickup up a new toshiba canvio 2tb from staples. Plug it in and the tablo saw it right away and formatted it. Now I’m good to go!
Hopefully tech support can figure out the seagate an then I can have two HDs connected. I assume I can connect two hard drive to the Tablo? There are 2 USB ports.
Right now, you can only have one HD at a time, but it sounds like at some point you could have two. I had to go out and buy another hard drive as well, but at least I can use my 2 TB Backup Plus for backing up my various systems.
@jwhitesel - There are two ports but we don’t support two HDs YET. On the roadmap for sure! At that time, the Tablo will load balance between the two.
We’re working on the 4K vs. 512 sector issue as well so you may be able to use that Seagate drive then.
I hope you work quickly on the Seagate issue, cause I don’t want to have to buy another drive. I bought the Seagate expressly for this application, and it’s too late to return it.
Is there a recommendation on the system? NTFS or exFat?
@vneyman, Tablo must format your hard drive today. Whatever is on the drive will get wiped. Filesystem I believe is ext4 (Linux)… I think (I looked at it at one time). There are threads somewhere in the forum that can verify that.
@jwhitesel - There are two ports but we don't support two HDs YET. On the roadmap for sure! At that time, the Tablo will load balance between the two. We're working on the 4K vs. 512 sector issue as well so you may be able to use that Seagate drive then.
@TabloTV that is an interesting tidbit… Specifically “the Tablo will load balance between the two”. That actually worries me, I guess it depends on how you actually do that. I am assuming a show on one drive only, not split? If you split the data that could end up being a bigger problem if a drive goes bad.
Just thinking here.
@cjcox It’s currently ext3 - will be ext4 in the new kernel.
@Jestep Might be open to change - we’ve been focusing on the new kernel for a while now, it could be that this logic could change by the time we begin work on it.
@TabloSupport, to be honest I probably won’t add a second drive as I delete as I watch and would prefer a delete all for a show than to get another drive 
But I know there are people filling up drives and maybe Show x goes on drive x and show y goes on drive y would be good, I just don’t see how splitting a single show across drives is going to help that much. IMHO
@TabloSupport - When you say that ext4 will be used in the next kernel, are you talking about the next firmware update? Will ext3 drives be converted to ext4? (I’ve read that ext4 performs better than ext3)
@Jestep Good point - it really is all about how you use the device/drive. We say that all the time here; some folks prefer to have a massive archive of stuff, others prefer to watch at a time and keep it a little more organized.
@mbellaire It will eventually be in the form of a firmware update. Hopefully soon, but no details that we can release just yet.
@TabloSupport, to be honest I probably won't add a second drive as I delete as I watch and would prefer a delete all for a show than to get another drive ;) But I know there are people filling up drives and maybe Show x goes on drive x and show y goes on drive y would be good, I just don't see how splitting a single show across drives is going to help that much. IMHO
Just FYI, but splitting across drives is how Tivo does it (and SageTV)…seems to be the ‘standard’ way of handling it.
@ChrisFix, I have opened and replace drives in both the Tivo’s I have, both were single drives. So what Tivo are you speaking of?