Poll - What HD are people using with Tablo

You have 3 Tablos at once location? Ballin’

If Tablo had a profile feature, like Netflix, I might have delayed purchasing a 2nd Tablo Quad.
However, we’d still have a major issue with disk space.
The wife want’s to record, and keep… everything.

2 - Tablo Quads at 1 location.
Wife records what she wants.
I record what I want.
Don’t touch my Tablo. :wink:

Next step is to set up VLANs to prevent the wife from cough maliciously cough connecting to my Tablo.
Don’t touch my Tablo. :fearful:

The Tablo Dual is at my mom’s house.
She just watches Live TV, but loves all the channels she has, cuz the antenna, and Tablo are on the 2nd floor, and loves being able to pause, FF/RW Live TV.

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Nice - it’s great Tablo let’s us have multiple devices under one subscription.

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Wait, wut? :wink:

We just finished setting up our Tablo,yesterday. We are using an 8Tb Seagate Expansion Desktop Drive. So far, no issues.

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I’ve used Western Digital external hard drives for years as the backup device for my computer. I’ve been using my old 350 GByte WD Ebook to do my initial Tablo testing (about 4 weeks now). I haven’t had any problems with it, even when running a Tablo TV screen on 2 different devices at the same time. If, and when, I finally am convinced that cutting the cord is a viable, I’ll probably upgrade to a new WD drive.

Using a 4 TB Seagate backup drive I got from Costco for $99.99 US. Been working great for about 2 weeks now.

Been using a 2TB Seagate Passport Portable drive for 3.7 yrs now with no problems. $79 from Costco.

Using Western Digital 2TB Elements Portable External Hard Drive - USB 3.0 - WDBU6Y0020BBK-WESN

1TB HGST Touro USB 3. Free from people upgrading to larger drives :slight_smile:

I have a bias towards desktop drives, as this relieves the tablo power supply from having to power the drive via USB. anything to keep the temp down :slight_smile: . WD elements desktop drive 4TB is working well for me. I even knocked it over by mistake while recording (yikes) and it didn’t even wink

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WD Elements 1TB. $49 from Amazon. I doubt I even need this much space. I just time-shift and keep shows for 3 episodes.

Has anyone used a “real” flash drive? (NOT a USB dongle, but a laptop/desktop drive in a portable enclosure?)

Tablo seems firm in the admonition against flash drives, but it is clear they are referring to “sticks”. I haven’t found where they have ever weighed-in on SATA flash drives in a USB enclosure.

Perhaps TRIM support (in Tablo) is an issue?

Wouldn’t a spreadsheet with this information be more helpful instead of threads and posts? Not complaining and NOT.volunteering for the job.

Just sayin’

The spreadsheet would be worthless in 3-4 mos. though. So, not only painful to do, but painful to keep updating. Just my opinion.

“Just bought the Super Cosmo Eliminator Ultra Speed USB 1.67TB Drive with proprietary cable and red LEDs for $10 (can you believe it!). I have the one covered in turquoise fur. But Tablo doesn’t seem to work well with it. I can’t keep on buying high end stuff just to have Tablo reject it.”

Maybe it’s time for Nuvyyo to qualify drives (not a complete list, but maybe a list of 5 that they test, realizing they too would have to keep it up to date).

This I agree with 5 recommended drives.valid point about keeping the spreadsheet current.

Does anyone know what kind of work load this saves the Tablo & what that would translate to in heat decrease?

In general, we like the WD Elements & Seagate Expansion lines. They’ve been dependable and are available in most stores.

https://www.tablotv.com/setup-networking/#harddrive

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a typical usb portable hard drive consumes on the order of 2 watts. tablo ranges from 9 to 15 depending on a number of factors.

So i would estimate that moving the hard drive off of the tablo power supply will reduce the load on tablo by something like 10 but probably not more than 15 percent. a tablo that is consuming only 9 watts is not doing much, which means it’s probably not hitting the disk drive (not much power draw from the USB port) . tablos that are working hard and consuming closer to the 15w figure (less for a 2-tuner) would most likely require heavy use of the disk as well, pushing it closer to 2 watts.

So, for example, of the total power consumption of a hard working 4 tuner tablo consuming 15w, 2 of those watts, or 13 percent, are powering the disk.

power corresponds directly to heat, so what we can say is that we can cause such a tablo to dissipate 13 percent less heat by offloading the hard disk. how that translates to temperature depends on the install environmental conditions. however, since most of the steady state factors involved are linear, it would not be that innacurate to say “tablo will run 13 percent cooler”

Doubtful. The problem isn’t power and cooling, it’s where that’s concentrated. I have a 2-tuner table with a HD sitting on top, it’s a cool running drive because you don’t need an ultra fast drive with Tablo. No heat problems. I mean, the top of the device might get warm, but not hot. Btw, Tablo doesn’t support that layout, just saying that in a properly cooled environment, it works.

Maybe I’m just one of the fortunate ones (owning 2 x 2-tuner Tablo device, one wired and one WiFi) that has no problems with heat.

Well, I have had my 4-tuner Tablo for just over 1 1/2 years and had 2 portable HD’s go bad - both within the first 6 months. In both cases I had the HD sitting on top of the Tablo with the Tablo sitting horizontal the way it is intended with the heat sink plate on bottom. Both HD’s got corrupted after an extended period of heavy use. The second time was when I discovered how hot both units were & that my second HD was corrupted again.

Since then, I have my Tablo sitting vertically on it’s side with my newest portable HD sitting next to it. It’s been over a year now & the third HD is fine, & my Tablo does not get near as hot anymore. I could be wrong & have no real proof, but I strongly believe that heat issues from my Tablo corrupted both of my first 2 HD’s.