Recording failures from lack of space but HDD is only 5% used

Support & Troubleshooting
1

I have a 4th gen with a Western Digital 1TB drive with USB3 connected. TABLO shows 925 GB available, yet recordings fail and report not enough storage available. The drive will show activity when it is in use with a flashing LED. On a few occasions, the drive has locked on with a steady LED until I shut down TABLO and reset it by removing power. That should not happen, so something is not right. I have, in the past, unintentionally recorded a lot of a series, probably filled the drive, had problems recording, so deleted those recordings to get it recording again. I have the problem again but with a lot fewer recordings on the HDD. If I delete some additional recordings, I can record a few shows before it happens again. I would reformat, but I have recordings I want to keep. If I had a Linux system I would look for corrupted files. Do others have this issue?

2

After checking some sources online, I found that the Tablo might just need a restart. If you haven’t done this yet you might give it a try. Also, how old is the hard drive?

Also, clear your Tablo App cache if you’re able.

Tablo TV App Cache - How and When to Clear It – Tablo

Tablo 4 stopped recording all shows “no storage space available” - Support & Troubleshooting - TabloTV Community

3

I assume removing power from the Tablo unit causes a restart. If so, that has been done a few times now. The hard drive is probably 7 years old but is has hardly been used until it was formatted by the Tablo a few months ago. In the Tablo app I do not find a place to clear cache. It looks like these instructions are for clearing the cache in the installed app itself. I have a Roku device, 2 Roku TVs and a Sony with the app installed. All exhibit the same issue, so I don’t think the app is the problem. I believe the hard drive has accumulated errors of some sort in the data..

4

Ya, it sounds like it. Your best bet may be to leave it as-is and contact Tablo support in the morning. They may even respond to this post in the morning with instructions.

DON’T reformat or remove the drive before contacting them because doing so could wipe out any logs they could use to troubleshoot.

Sorry to hear.

5

Thanks for trying to help.

6

One last thing you might do if you haven’t already is Google the LED status light meaning for LED steady ON.