@Jerz It’s possible this could have caused problems. If the Tablo is writing to the disk or talking to our server and the power is pulled, it can cause some firmware issues.
I’m having the same issues with this Tablo again now that there is about 200Gigs left on the hard drive… I have a hard time connecting and based on the light flashing on the tablo it looks like it reboots every once in a while. Any ideas? Seems to work just fine until the disk get to around 200gigs remaining.
Yup… it’s taking forever to connect this morning when usually it hooks up flawlessly. I’ve rebooted both the tablo and the router.
@TabloSupport any ideas? It kinda defeats the purpose if I have to reformat the HD every time it almost gets full…
I would bet it is the hard drive. I started with a WD 2TB drive and they seem to have a built in time out in the actual hard drive. My Tablo never worked after a few hours of not using it. This was caused by the Hard drive "going to sleep". I also searched for a way to turn off the "sleep mode" of the HD but I don't believe the Western Digitals have that option. I replaced that HD with a Seagate BUP Slim 2TB and the issue has gone away completely and the Tablo works great, well except for me not being able to get Port forwarding working, but that is a different story.
Hopefully this helps.
@crm1975 is this the one you have?
I’m willing to try anything at this point… very frustrating with this thing… works great and then all of a sudden it doesn’t work at all.
Check this thread for drives reported to work well:
http://community.tablotv.com/discussion/108/tested-hard-drives
Check the more recent posts.
I have a 320 gb HDD and went down to 30 gb and it worked fine so I don’t know what it is about your 200 gb mark.
I bought a recommended drive which is why I’m a bit irritated.
I shouldn’t have to dig through a thread to find out if a drive will work or not…
I bought the Western Digital Elements 2TB drive based on this here: https://www.tablotv.com/blog/tablo-usb-hard-drive-specifications-suggestions/
I agree with you for sure. However, that post is from Jan. 21, 2014 - a lot has changed with the Tablo since. I feel like the WD Elements problems have been coming up more in the past few months. They have been able to fix it for some.
Yes, Mine is black but otherwise that is the exact same drive I have and have not had any issues
What is the free space left on your drive though? The OP’s experience is when it is less than 200 GB (yes a very weird problem).
I was losing connection with almost all 2 TB free with the WD. Basically every morning I would have to unplug the WD HD to get it to work again. Once I replaced it with the Seagate I have not had any issues. My current HD has over 1.5TB free. I have only had my Tablo for about 6 months and keep it relatively clean (usually less than 1/2 TB used).
So I guess Tablo needs to change their documentation to not recommend the WD Elements drive anymore.
Drive manufacturers often change specs without changing the model numbers so it’s wise to check the most recent thoughts on working drives. It’s scary when you are in the computer/network support business and have to spec out parts!
I can recall years ago an order of 6 computers, all ordered the same day, all arrived the same day, consecutive serial numbers. The computers had slightly different free drive space after the drives were formatted and had different amounts of free RAM even though the RAM totals were the same.
I worked where we engineered and made electronic devices - at times we were not able to use “equivalent parts” and had to sped a specific make and part number. For example a Motorola transistor PNP part number xyz may have a TI equal in specs, but the TI caused the controllers to act differently, including the programs burned into the ROM. So they had to say “no replacements” for certain parts. Electronic parts may have the same “specs” but act differently due to manufacturing tolerances. So a WD drive may be made with different components and act differently than those made earlier. There’s no such thing as two identical electronic devices.
I think what the WD issue is that it has a built in sleep timer if not in use that as far as I could find, could not be turned off. The Seagate doesn’t seem to have that so it seems to work a lot better. I doubt that it matters at all but I have a 4 tuner Tablo in case anyone was wondering.
I have the 4 tuner as well… I’ll wait and see if Tablo Support wants to look at the logs on this one before I throw another hundred dollars at this thing for another new HD.
Support had me delete shows so the drive is less than 80% full and it’s now working again… So apparently there must be some reason the auto delete feature isn’t auto deleting… 