My avatar is Lauren Sangster, a YouTube plus size model, very beautiful lady.
I’m not exactly sure how it works, but it seems like the Tablo somehow “pairs” a hardrive with the Tablo… Like it puts some sort of identifying ID on it. If you swap out the Tablo it will force you to reformat the drive. I think the same is true if you do a factory reset, as if the ID is assigned to the Tablo when it is set up.
Maybe…just maybe… if you are fairly computer savvy… you might be able to do a full ‘disk copy’ to the new drive and carry over that ID. I haven’t tried this, so I am just speculating. This is assuming you didn’t factory reset the Tablo. And remember the Tablo formats in EXT4.
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I did a factory reset because nothing was working last night,even without the HD.
Too bad.
Bummer - I’ve yet to find a list of compatible HD’s on the Support website. The narrow list under the Hard Drive Recommendations heading at the link below is the closest I can find. It appears that they’re saying … “use only Western Digital or Seagate drives.”
.
This is the one that I have. As I mentioned earlier, if I had to do it over again I probably would not get an SSD. Mine is working fine, but standard spinning platters HDs have a better reputation for long life…and they are about 2/3 the price.
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When I first set up my Tablo, I recorded a few test programs then turn off the Tablo pulled the external drive and plugged it into my Linux (Ubuntu) laptop, just to see what was on there. All the programming is in folders. In there are the video files in both high and low resolution. The video is all stored in about 10 second clips. There are also the image files for the thumbnails (about twenty thumbnails in one image).
If you have a Linux device you could at least play with it… Format the drive with the Tablo, then see if you can drag and drop the folders/files onto the new drive. Maybe the Tablo will recognize them. At worst, you can reformat the drive in Linux. When you plug it back into the Tablo it will prompt you to reformat it yet again.
I just came onboard this week and paired a Samsung T7 SSD with my Gen 4. But I’ve got a 4TB WD Elements drive laying around that I’m tempted to put in its place. It’s still hard for me to imagine a spinning disk being more reliable than an SSD however.
If you’re like me, you go by the old addage - if it ain’t broke…fiddle with it until it is. 
Seriously though - if it’s working then why change?
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I get it. It is counter-intuitive. You would think that fewer moving parts would be more reliable, but it has to do the the number of times an SSD can re-write to the same address.
I’m not saying there is anything wrong with SSDs, that is what I am using. But, there is some reliable data to suggest that traditional hard-drives have better long-term reliability in high read/write applications. Still, I’m hoping that my SSD will outlast my Tablo (whether the Tablo blows-up or is replaced by some newer unforeseen technology).
Here’s your proof, particularly the sections titled Writing data excessively to your SSD and Using your SSD for the wrong tasks. Seems counterintuitive to me too, but I’ll go with this.
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Great article. I should cite my sources. Thanks for doing it for me ,
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Too late, I erased everything.
Do you have to get a Western Digital Elements or a Seagate Expansion ?
Can it be any Seagate or WD USB3 ?
Are you recording enough RN that you really need to have an external drive?
If it matters, I was using a cheap Samsung 500G SSD on one of my Tablos and it worked perfectly. I think @KimchiGUN is right, though, about some HDDs needing that extra power boost in order to work properly with the Tablo. It’s a USB 2.0 port, so think about the low power draw it has. I imagine most SSDs would be fine with what little power they need.
Edit: The SSD was used on the Tablo until I sold the puck last week.
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I would assume that you could most any WD or Seagate. They recommend between 1TB and 8TB.
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Yes, my wife recorded 300 GB in a week of shows. Mostly on the streaming channels.
There was a discussion here a while ago about the fact that the ssd, based on flash memory, has a wearout mechanism and becomes useless over time. The DVR environment accelerates the wearout due to the number of write-delete cycles.
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Electromigration. Electrons will move from one end of a wire to the other. Since the connections are so small, it is a problem in SSDs that have high usage.
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My OG Tablo will be 10 years old this May. The 1tb spinny “Fantom Drives” hard drive, which was around 2 years old when I moved it to the Tablo, is still working with no signs of giving up. I think it uses a WD drive.
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I still have a hard time accepting flash in the dvr environment because of the physics involved in how they work. They depend on distorting an electric field in a quantum well. We can distort the field but can’t completely remove the distortion. Writing data distorts the field. Erasing data tries to remove the field. The problem is that some residual charge is left behind with every write/erase cycle. Eventually the well will remain fully charged, never to be erased.
We initially could get 100 read/write cycles b4 we would get stuck bits. We eventually got a thosund then up to ten thousand due to improvement in reducing the impurities in the material used to make the flash memory.
Some things were done to the controller to improve the appearance of longer life like single bit error correcting.
It’s too much to get into.