For me the next hard drive I pick up will be a non Seagate BUP Slim.
I have now tried the STDR2000102 blue & the STDR2000100 black. For each drive the Tablo recognizes it as Seagate BUP Slim BK 0143 (2000GB) & when I try to format it on the Tablo it just says “Formatting Hard Drive” for the rest of time. After failing to initially format through the Tablo for both drives I also deleted the partitions via my PC & formatted there as a few have suggested. Sadly though I had the same results when then plugging it back into the Tablo.
That’s discouraging to have another one fail…My STDR2000100 from Amazon is doing fine so far, I’ve recorded about 2 dozen shows and watched 3 of them, they’re fine and recorded in their entirety.Just grateful I didn’t run into same problems with this latest hard drive. Knock wood it’ll continue without issues…
So I finally gave up on the Seagate BUP 2TB I previously bought to upgrade my drive and got a WD Elements 2TB. The drive connected and formatted without a problem. Ideally I’d like to move all of my recordings from my original 300GB drive to the new drive so followed some guidance from @AndyW 's post on transferring recordings and got Paragon’s EXTFS app. Installed ExtFS, Connected both drives (old and new) to my mac, mounted the drives and copied everything from the rec dir on the old to the rec directory on the new drive. Attached the drive to my 4 tuner Tablo, it’s recognized and works but can’t see the old recordings. Am I missing a hidden file or something the maps the rec folders on the Tablo?? Any advise? @tablosupport@gradman2k3
Question for the group…I have the Seagate Backup Plus Slim 2TB and have experienced the issues described above. I have reformatted using my Windows 8 PC into a NTFS format. Once I plug the drive back into the Tablo, how long should it take to reformat for Tablo? Currently about 20 minutes into the formatting process…
CONFIRMED: GOOD BRAND NAME: Inateck PRODUCT NAME: FE2005 USB 3.0
SIZE Toshiba 750 GB HD
LINK http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00KYF1LLI/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o03_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 COMMENTS The enclosure works great and is fast. I just used an extra HD I had used when I upgraded my laptop to a SSD.
Would not recognize. Checked and found that it was formatted to 4000K so reformatted to 512K and still no success. Exchanged at Best Buy for Toshiba Canvio Connect 2T works great
As a new user (after researching for a few weeks and purchasing a Tablo a few days ago) I find this thread pretty troubling. This “issue” is very clearly an engineering problem. I understand the reasoning to “find” a drive(s) that conforms to the flawed firmware, but the underlying issue is that this product is worthless without storage and the fix isn’t a list of approved drives, but a firmware spec that works with any commonly available drive and hopefully that is the route Nuvyyo is taking in the background.
Unfortunately, I been down this same exact road as an engineer for a similar product using hard drives. In this case, the Tablo has a real-time clock, a processor and it knows when the drive needs to be used. It’s simple enough to issue wake up commands at appropriate times and let the drive spin down when it isn’t needed for hours at a time extending drive life and reducing power consumption and heat. There also should be some provision using the other USB interface to automatically back up video files to a secondary drive.
All in all, this product rocks and certainly is the best choice on the market currently (for us cable cutters - uverse in my case) so I hope this works out and Nuvyyo doesn’t get greedy like their largest competitor.
Have you ( @TabloTV ) considered offering a bundled package (tuner, HD, antenna) available directly from you? Might help alleviate concerns for folks that haven’t taken the plunge yet.
CONFIRMED: GOOD BRAND NAME: Western Digital PRODUCT NAME: wdbaaf5000ebk || My Book Essentials 500 GB USB 2.0 Desktop External Hard Drive
SIZE: 500 GB
LINK http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digital-Essential-Desktop-External/dp/B002JMWBRW# COMMENTS: Reviewers on Amazaon apparently don't like it, but if you have one sitting around (like I did), it will work. There's a small partition for their annoying software that will rob you of recording space, but it's not a lot, and doesn't interfere with the Tablo.
CONFIRMED: GOOD
BRAND NAME: WESTERN DIGITAL
PRODUCT NAME: PASSPORT WDT-A7B (Red, Old Original Passport)
SIZE: 160GB
COMMENTS: Had this old portable backup drive in a closet and thought I would give it a try. Connected to laptop first to confirm that it was accessible and that I had pulled everything off of it. Fired right up and ran diagnostics on it. Everything checked out, so plugged it into the Tablo unit. Then during setup of the Tablo, it recognized the drive and prompted me to format the drive. Took about 5 minutes or so. Tested it by recording a live TV show and played it back when it was complete. To my amazement it worked just fine. Based on the amount of space consumed by the 1 hour program recorded at 720p, it looks like I will get about 50 hours of recording capacity out of this little drive.
PRODUCT NAME: WD Elements WDE1U2500N SIZE: 250 GB LINK: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136077 COMMENTS: This is an old drive and it's no longer available, however I had it lying around and it seems to work well. It gets very hot, though. This drive requires an external power brick, so it doesn't have to draw any juice from the Tablo. USB 2.0 with 7200 RPM 3.5" drive. It is much sturdier than typical USB hard drives.
As a new user (after researching for a few weeks and purchasing a Tablo a few days ago) I find this thread pretty troubling. This "issue" is very clearly an engineering problem. I understand the reasoning to "find" a drive(s) that conforms to the flawed firmware, but the underlying issue is that this product is worthless without storage and the fix isn't a list of approved drives, but a firmware spec that works with any commonly available drive and hopefully that is the route Nuvyyo is taking in the background.
Unfortunately, I been down this same exact road as an engineer for a similar product using hard drives. In this case, the Tablo has a real-time clock, a processor and it knows when the drive needs to be used. It's simple enough to issue wake up commands at appropriate times and let the drive spin down when it isn't needed for hours at a time extending drive life and reducing power consumption and heat. There also should be some provision using the other USB interface to automatically back up video files to a secondary drive.
All in all, this product rocks and certainly is the best choice on the market currently (for us cable cutters - uverse in my case) so I hope this works out and Nuvyyo doesn't get greedy like their largest competitor.
@idsharp, I’m not exactly sure which issue you’re referring to, but I also noticed that the Tablo seems to overtax the external disk. Consumer grade USB drives are not meant to be spun 24/7 and they will either fail or overhead and shutdown rather quickly. Mine gets hot… REALLY hot. I suspect the issues that some other users have with Seagate drives are related. Also the >2TB drive issue is going to have to be fixed, because soon they will be the only option.
To be honest, if Nuvyyo can just make it another year or so, they can probably just require SSDs and be done with this silliness.
I will get the exact specs, model, etc. but I had not yet received the drive I was going to use in any final setup and had a SATA drive docking station on hand already and a couple of SATA drives from ex-computers. I plugged the SATA drive dock into a USB port, dropped a 160 gig drive into the dock, Tablo recognized the drive, formatted it and has used it on 4 test recordings, one of them 2 hours worth. The dock and drive sit silent and inactive unless recording, when recording I can watch the red LED on the dock itself flash and the heads move as data is written to the drive during recording. It’s a very steady flash as it writes. When it’s done recording the dock and drive go dark other than the green light indicating the SATA docking station is powered up. It runs quietly and not all that warm - the same drives inside my computer ran a lot hotter. I leave my computers running 24/7 and never shut down drives. Having worked with EEs with high-end industrial control systems and control computers there’s a fact often overlooked… electronics fail at power-up. Almost every case of failure of electronics it is a case “it was working before I shut it off”. Of course it did, it failed on power-up.
For most electronics if you can supply constant clean power it’s best to simply leave them on or running. Cool/heat/cool/heat causes stress. The surge that all electronics suffer when powering up is what helps kill them, too. Removing the heating and cooling cycles, remove the surge and they last much longer. I rarely ever have failures but I leave my equipment running all the time and don’t power drives down either. Because drives are electro-mechanical there are other factors, but the spindles these days are very reliable so it’s seldom a problem there either.
In any case, although I have a 2t drive on hand to use with the Tablo, assuming we keep it, I actually like how it works with my SATA USB docking station.
@dhowland The Tablo doesn’t use the disk if the unit itself is ‘idle’. The Tablo will only use the disk itself if it’s playing live TV, recording an airing, or playing back existing recorded content.
The issue we’ve seen with the WD Elements drive (specific to firmware version 1042) is that if the disk is idle for too long, it wouldn’t wake up to the Tablo’s requests to wake up.