That’s likely where things went horribly wrong. You should never stack two heat-generating pieces of electronics.
Truth be told, I know that & didn’t have them stacked like that. But the wife likes to clean & would stack them to make it easier to dust around. Now that I have the Tablo sitting vertically, she doesn’t do that.
Designing the Tablo to sit vertically with the heat sink plate more exposed might be ‘food for thought’.
My 2cents: I’m going on 4 yrs now and when I first started I connected a 2TB seagate passport portable usb drive to my Tablo 4. And it worked ok with a variety of problems from time to time - that support was able to resolve after some time. I watched the Tablo pretty close for a month or two. I checked the temp and it always seemed to be very hot - so I got a $10 laptop cooler from Amazon and set the Tablo on it and the hd right next to it. It is now just barely warm to the touch. Much better. And I have no data or proof, but it seemed that I have had less problems after that, and in fact have had no problems for the last year or so. (Did have to replace PS a few months ago, but still using the same HD)
From my years in Semiconductor R&D I know that heat is the most important thing to control and will destroy many chips before their time. Todays chips are rated up to 150-175 F, but there is lots of data the shows the lifetime of all chips is a function of operational temps.
What people seem to be saying is the top of their Tablo gets so hot that you can’t leave your hand on it. If that’s the case, then, yes, it’s running way to hot.
" The problem isn’t power and cooling, it’s where that’s concentrated"
true but consider the problem from the standpoint of the tablos power supply. by powering a 2 watt drive from a 15 watt tablo, you are asking tablos power supply to supply 2 of the 15 watts. by using a desktop hard drive the tablos power supply now only has to supply 13 watts. that makes tablos power supply generate less heat by a factor of its internal resistance times the square of delivered current delta.
I’m using a 2TB WD Elements. It is powered by my 2-tuner Tablo. The other USB port supplies power to a laptop cooler that both devices sit on. I didn’t have overheating issues but figured if I could limit potential future issues for $14, why not. I don’t have any proof on whether there is or isn’t an increase in power consumption or heat to the Tablo but I know mine is solid and does it’s job.
As far as the WD Elements, I like that it’s powered by the device it’s attached to. One less power supply block I have to fit on a surge protector strip.
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Mind linking the cooler you have? Thinking about grabbing one just to play it safe.
Thanks. Appreciate it.
Understand your logic, I was just pointing out the flaw in the logic, in other words, it probably doesn’t help the problem, at least not nearly as much as you think.
Probably one of the best reasons for a bus powered drive. Power sockets and room for cords and aesthetics and all…
to be more precise, the actual power dissipation relieved by offloading the hard drive is equal to the power delivered to the hard drive (2 watts) multiplied by (1-E) where E is the efficiency of the tablo power supply. that is, assuming an 80 percent efficiency switching power supply, tablo has to do dissipate .4 watts in its own heat sink just to deliver 2 watts to the hard drive. so the actual heat savings is closer to 4 percent, depending on the efficiency of the tablo power supply. I acknowledge that is small, but its measurable, and more important when airflow around tablo is poor.
Again, you’re assumption is that it’s one big equal brick, and it’s not. So, my guess your 4 percent could even be less and I’ll say likely negligible. I mean, kudos for trying, but you’re better off looking at how cool it rather than trying to figure out how to make it produce less heat. Well, unless you want to dig deeper (factor in how heat is dissipated)… 
But even then, we’ll just have a number(s) which essentially says, turn the sucker on its side or add an active cooler solution, etc… or of course, a possible design recommendation with regards to better dissipation via syncs, materials and ventilation.
But I do like math and science, but you know sometimes it’s that engineer in the room that makes things work.
sure it’s one big brick. Heat dissipation is a function of the onboard cooling system and it’s ability to transfer heat into the surrounding air. but this little exercise was never intended to solve a heat problem…only to show the incremental impact . BTW engineers typically deal with factors greater than 10 percent
I use a regular 256 gb flash drive from a place in my city called Micro Center. It’s their brand and it works flawlessly! It cost me $16.99 and it has all the room I need and holds a lot of hours of shows.
Update August 14th 2020. The Tablo started buffering something terrible and I was told by tech support that my storage was too small because live tv still uses the harddrive. So I went and bought a WD Elements 3TB. Target had it on sale for $65.00 and all’s well.
We also are lucky enough to have a Micro Center. Love that place!
WD Blue 1TB SSD - No Issues