Thank you to all of the knowledgeable people who commented on my last issue about my Tablo not receiving all of the channels that my HDTV receivers receive, I have another question.
Since getting my new Tablo 4 Receiver up and running Tuesday night my hard drive has disconnected four times. This happened twice Tuesday night and I didn’t think too much about it because I knew the hard drive had to format itself and figured the overall system was updating, etc. However it happened again yesterday and once today. Each time I get the following message:
“Playback Error”; “Your tuner has been reassigned or your device has temporarily lost connection with your Tablo”
My hard drive is a Western Digital Elements 2TB USB 3.0 Portable External Hard Drive WDBU6Y002BBK-EESN.
I am going to return it to Amazon and get another hard drive. My question is what hard drive do you suggest based on the one you use and don’t have any issues with. If this hard drive should be ok then I’ll simply have Amazon send another one just like this one. Alternatively, if you suggest another hard drive, I’ll get that one.
The WD elements is a good drive. There were models with the P/N suffix of “-03” that needed a firmware update. But that was over a year ago and the manufacturing run had been putting out suffixes -04 and -05.
The WD site has a full set of tools for updating the firmware if needed and checking for a bad disk
I originally purchased a WD elements HD & it worked for like 2 days & began disconnecting. By day 4 it wasn’t working at all. I finally discovered that it had gone bad. I returned it & purchased a Seagate Backup Plus Slim. It’s been working fine for two months now.
It’s like anything. Some disks are born bad. Some specific manufacturing plants might have low quality. Or a specific manufacturing run could have low quality.
I have two WD 1TB elements. One running for 24 months and the other for 18 months. Longer then I expected.
Just installed Western Digital (WD) My Passport 3TB Model WDBYFT0030BBK-WESN (USB2/3) from Best Buy to replace a powered WD World Book (USB2) and it installed/works great right out of the box. The saved recordings are far better (no picture drop outs, no playback hangs, etc) than the 5 year old model. If you are using an old powered hard drive, you might want to consider a newer model.
So Plan B has been to do some additional testing. It looks like the Tablo/Hard drive combination works fine as long as:
Table Connect: Remote Access is not checked
or Advanced: Enable fast Live TV startup is not checked
I have been recording and watching Live TV for 3 days now without any disconnects.
Additionally, the Tablo works best with TV Stations with good signals. If the signal is not good, you will get playback hangs assuming a recording was possible.
Net: the WD - My Passport 3TB Model WDBYFT0030BBK-WESN seems to work well and sits well with the Tablo.