I like Tablo, but

General Discussion
1
What a pain to upgrade a Tablo hard drive (320 GB > 2 TB). Tablo remembers what was on the old hard drive after you format the new hard drive.

Really? How hard could it be to delete the Recording metadata during the drive formatting? So I am stuck manually deleting a couple of hundred movies/shows. Like I don't have anything better to do for 2+ hours.

Yeah, I know. It's on the requested features list. I wish the firmware would catch up with the hardware.

Tom
2

If you formated the new drive I think all you need to do is clear the cache on the browser you used to do the setup.

3

That is correct, you should factory reset the Tablo when installing a new hard drive.

4

I finished deleting the old metadata using Roku interface. Not sure I would want to do a factory reset unless Tablo remembers my saved program selections in the cloud. If factory reset does this then Tablo support ticket from earlier today should have told me to utilize that method. I really don’t see why it’s not something that automatically happens during hard drive formatting.


Tom

5

Just giving advise that you asked for based on our experiences.


Tablo is a great device that the Tablo crew is working very hard on to make it a true plug and play experience. At the moment it takes some technical know how and sometimes fiddling but it is getting better everyday.

You are free to use the advise we give or go another route.
6

EVERYTHING, all recording information for future recordings, all data about everything is saved on the drive.
It’s cached to the computer, etc. as well so they can become out of sync so to speak but if you format the drive then you don’t have recording information on the device.
If you do a factory reset and have a freshly formatted drive it’s like opening a sealed Tablo box and starting over. 
If there is information seen when you launch the web app it’s because it’s cached locally. The Tablo is factory fresh with no recording information. 

When swapping drives, you basically start over, at least that’s how I understand it. Drive swaps are not to be taken lightly. 

7

Don’t think anyone thought of the use case of swapping out drives when the system was designed.  Since none of the competition do it, why would one think it is possible with Tablo.

8

Even Tivo was a pain to upgrade a drive do this which I did a couple of times. But truly not supported by them. Would be nice if Tablo made an easy way to do this :wink:

9

I’m a happy camper again. I really like my Tablo and the new firmware with Roku thumbnails previews is great.


“why would one think it is possible with Tablo?” Because it is an external USB drive that takes about 5 seconds to replace with another drive.

The single source of authority for recordings should be stored on the drive. We should be able to switch out hard drives on a Tablo with current recordings information without having to do anything (except formatting if it’s a new drive).

Tom

10