Minimum external storage capacity?

General Discussion
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That article, factory reset is for an “old taboo” which you’ll be removing from servece.

You may wish to perform a factory reset on Tablo for one of the following reasons:

You are selling your Tablo DVR
You are giving your Tablo DVR to a new owner
You have tried absolutely everything else to fix your Tablo (including talking to our amazing Tablo Support representatives

The article about factory reset says it isn’t something you do for “fun” - officially.

That’s my point. They tell you how to move your drive, not necessarily swap them… although the end result may be similar. That’s an interputation, they never mention “now take your other drive”, that point is missing.

22

I believe these things all use up a tuner:

  1. Each device watching a live channel uses a tuner. Depending on your household, is it possible to have two tv’s on at once?
  2. Each concurrent recording uses up a tuner.
  3. Processing the recording to remove commercials uses a tuner
  4. Processing the recording to create the FF/RW thumbnails uses a tuner
  5. and probably more that I haven’t thought about.

For the price difference, the quad made more sense for our family of 4. Besides, I’ve found I’ve been recording some of the sub-channels a lot more than I expected, building up collections of old sit-coms I loved when I was younger and feel like rewatching in a binge. (It’s amazing that a whole season of something like Cheers gets rebroadcast within a single week!) So, I’ve been leveraging a lot more tuners that I ever expected.

23

I have 3 TVs at the moment, 2 of which have their own antenna hookups (don’t worry, I have a pre-amp) and another which I will probably only use to watch OTA broadcasts (recorded or live) very rarely. I’m also the only one in the house who will use any tuners (until my 6-year-old becomes a teen).
About 3 and 4 though: what decides when those will kick off? Are those processes started automatically or manually? Can they be pre-empted for things like a recording schedule?

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There is no #3. CS is done by AI/ML in the AWS cloud and is scheduled after #4 successfully completes.

25

Ah, ok, I stand corrected. I thought I had saw something about it needing a tuner to be free when I was looking up some information before trying to figure out why a show that had recorded a 1/2 hour earlier wasn’t processed yet.

26

#3 needs #4. But I’ve never had #4 interfere with a scheduled recording or live live TV.

Of course if you have a 10-12 hour recording, #4 can take awhile. And if it gets interrupted by a recordings I don’t promise that #4 gets rescheduled.

27

I don’t think that there is a “minimum” hard drive size. As you pointed out - smaller drives just can’t store as many recordings.

28

There’s a practical minimum though. Unless it’s ok to record literally seconds of just ONE show using a manual recording or something like that.

29

My Tablo ‘Recording Quality’ is set to HD1080 - 8 Mbps.
Every hour of recording uses around 2.25GB disk space on my Tablo’s hard drive.
Although the hard drive is 4TB, it rarely contains more than 100GB of recordings.
I periodically watch recordings, and then delete what I finished watching.

The bigger issue is the hard drive manufacture dates.
Tablo devices have issues with older hard drive sleep functions.
Some older hard drive manufacturers released updated firmware to fix drive sleep issues, but not in every case, and it’s something you’d need to research, and apply a drive firmware fix, if it exists.
You may be lucky and not have issues with older hard drives, but keep it in mind.

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