Yup, it was a month old. I found the very old email with support…
> tablo
We have had a look at the log your Tablo sends to our database; it seems that the Tablo has been experiencing frequent reboots due to the hard drive disconnecting while it is being recorded to. As well, the Tablo log shows the hard drive as being 0% used. It seems as though the drive may be beginning to fail.
In the end I replied
I did try a different drive with the same results. Both tested with no errors. I wanted to save my recordings so I copied them via rsync and there was absolutely no errors (obviously this involves just disk reads, no writing) while both were connect to a pc. Before starting over I used ffmpeg to save the shows via the tablotv device. Again, no errors from either.
I cleared the first drive and factory reset the tabloTV. I haven’t encountered any issue yet after about a week.
I copied everything from the drive - with out any errors. Copied everything to a different drive - no write errors, but same “bad hard drive” problems. I did run diagnosis test via PC… no errors found. I have my recording quality to 720 - 5Mps live TV set to 720 3Mps
I’m not saying there is no hard drive issues. But yes, it seem like it can be a generic message as “many” are getting them while their drives don’t have any real problems.
Drives fail, I haven’t found it to be very common, many of my drive are “used” from eBay and several years later still spinning (not that all of them actually spin). So I’m not going to tell users to not to believe this, but to investigate a bit deeper.