I’m about to take the plunge and purchase my first Tablo. Along with that, I’ll need a hard drive. I was considering this one from Amazon: Seagate Expansion 5TB Desktop External Hard Drive USB 3.0 (STEB5000100). However, after considering many options I’m unsure if I need that big a drive. Right now, on Uverse I have about 50 1/2 hour shows saved and maybe, four HD movies at most at any one time. Many programs I simply “time shift”, like the news to watch when convenient. I’d like some feedback on the size of drive I should purchase and, if possible, some recommendations.
I have this Western Digital 2TB drive here:
With all the Jeopardy, Dr. Phil, Big Bang Theory, 20/20, Dateline, and such before I started extracting regularly to my Plex media server I got to to about 30-40% full with about 100 or so shows on there at the Tablo default recording quality of HD720 - 5Mbps.
Bigger is usually better but it can also lead to loosing a lot more when it fails. For me the 2TB range is just perfect. Had I known how I was going to use it with Plex and extracting my shows to there instead of watching from the Tablo unit (I just use my Tablo for DVR duty and not watching live or recorded content) I would have gone smaller but your thoughts might differ.
For what it’s worth since I extract all my content to Plex to watch I barely crack 10% usage on the drive. 
Works fine.
I typically have about 25 1-2 hr recordings running It’s a mix of HD and SD.
With my 1 TB hard drive I have never gone past 30% of capacity.
I use that hard drive. It is big- bigger than I .must. have- but it gives me the freedom not to need to actively chase clearing programs (while waiting for Tablo to add ‘keep x episodes’). But more than that, it lets me collect series- for example I have a lot of Big Bang episodes and Barney Miller episodes and I’m able to watch my way through the series at my leisure. I currently have 85 unwatched episodes of Barney Miller I’m working my way through in series order; they don’t always broadcast in series order, but I can watch them that way. I do periodically delete programs / series when I finish them, but I don’t have to do that frequently nor worry that something might get overwritten due to lack of space.
I’m 6 months in and I’m using 1.5TB of the 5TB drive. I’ve decided that the small delta above the cost of the smaller drives has allowed me to not have to worry about having enough space. It’s not like an extra $30 one time cost is making the difference between cord-cutting being a good solution for my family or not.
Depends on what quality you record at. I’d suggest the 5 TB at the beginning as that will be much easier than updating later. You still can only use ONE disk on the Tablo and since the size has been increased, @TabloTV or @TabloSupport said it lowers the priority of being able to use two disk on the Tablo.
I have a 1 TB drive and wish I had a bigger drive because it is always full.