I think this feature could be useful in reducing HDD wear. Hard drives generally have excellent longevity these days, but why have them being unnecessarily written to for a few extra hours every week? Although, I suppose the writes would be sequential, so it's less wear than otherwise.
@ShadowsPapa What would you think of a menu to individually release tuners (not being used for scheduled recordings) from the settings menu? (Also you're not opinionated at all, are you? ;-) )
I know this is an old thread but I may have a solution. If the disconnect GUI option were used the Tablo could assume the viewer never intends to view something the tuner(s) might be writing to the mass storage drive. Then when the last viewer disconnects and there are no currently scheduled recordings, the Tablo could stop all writing to disk. If the disconnect option were not used, things would work exactly as they do now. If I had a four tuner model and all four tuners were is use and writing to the hard drive “due to Live TV viewing of four different channels” I would like the chose to stop those recording and not wait for the current timeout. IE… I would almost alway use the disconnect option, but I would use the current mode in some viewing scenarios.