Further proof that thankfully Tablo is not Windows-based or it would wear out even a robust drive!
Seriously, I’ve found the Tablo does nothing with the hard drive until you initiate something, meaning any drive should last a very long time and it will be quieter and run cooler that way. Tablo must be OS9 or Linux-based to be that “quiet” regarding the drive but then if the OS is self-contained why would it ever touch that drive except to read or write content - recordings, buffering live TV, etc. That part was brilliantly thought out - now when the drive size limits are dealt with at some point, all drive issues go away. One thing at a time, eh? The fact that even a 1t drive will handle hundreds of hours of shows means there’s a huge number of drives that could be used. With a SATA dock it expands the drive selection like crazy!
I’m thinking it’s Linux, the filesystem is ext4 (I believe). 1TB is pretty big, but if you’re going to use the Tablo device as a repository, the mp4 ts files are actually pretty big. An American NFL football game can be well over 8G in size. That may not sound too big, but it’s probably twice the size of what most media transcoders are used to (just saying).
When you have recordings set on a schedule (especially when picking up all seasons, etc…)… it fills up pretty fast!
I just make sure to move stuff off and onto my Plex server periodically. To help with management of that, I actually segregate my Tablo TV (includes sports) and Tablo Movies as separate Plex libraries, to make it easy to delete shows and movies once I obtain true media and rip them. But I know most aren’t quite as concerned about doing things that way.
I can’t sit through a football game, live or recorded, so no worries there. Movies, yeah, action, Sci-Fi and so on, need action. I wish that Tablo could handle drive swapping and simply re-read a drive and reindex it so I could keep 1 drive for this, another drive for that, etc as the SATA dock is hot-swappable. When on a computer I can pull one drive and plop in another and it’s just like any other USB drive. I’d get a bunch of 500 gig drives or so and start collecting stuff. Ah but then that defeats the purpose of streaming multiple content to different devices. OK, forget I mentioned it. Nothing to see here, move along please…
(so the Superbowl ® won’t fit a standard DVD, eh?)
@ShadowsPapa, pretty sure Tablo is working to make things more flexible on the storage front.
And, having a Plex Media Server is one way to collect stuff and have a distributed network streaming service.
Basically I pull content off the Tablo, transcode (in a Roku direct play compatible format) it and put it on my Plex server. Then I delete the content off the Tablo. In our house we had Plex a long time before Tablo, so the family is used to finding media on the Plex. In fact, often times, I get things moved to the Plex before even watched on the Tablo… so the Tablo gets used quite often just for live content. In all fairness, I usually pull TV shows by whole season when I put them into Plex… so that stuff sits on the Tablo longer until I have the whole season.
I know some people with 50TB or more hanging off their Plex server. Mine is smaller, about 3.5 TB, but it runs 24x7 using a lower power ultra-mini computer. Well… actually I have two Plex servers, and the other one does have access to about 8TB. I use it to stage stuff for the 24x7 low power Plex.
I may need to look into that, being IT I have a lot of computers, drives, parts, power supplies and network equipment laying around. I could put together a Ubuntu system pretty fast and with the Blu Ray able to stream ANY content from any device on my network to the TV, well. it could be a nice thing, but the learning curve would be steep for me never having used Plex…
I could stack a lot of drives or use a NAS device.
Back to the topic, I’ll post info on that SATA dock and drive tonight - it works so perfectly well.
@ShadowsPapa, pretty sure Tablo is working to make things more flexible on the storage front.
And, having a Plex Media Server is one way to collect stuff and have a distributed network streaming service.
Basically I pull content off the Tablo, transcode (in a Roku direct play compatible format) it and put it on my Plex server. Then I delete the content off the Tablo. In our house we had Plex a long time before Tablo, so the family is used to finding media on the Plex. In fact, often times, I get things moved to the Plex before even watched on the Tablo... so the Tablo gets used quite often just for live content. In all fairness, I usually pull TV shows by whole season when I put them into Plex... so that stuff sits on the Tablo longer until I have the whole season.
I know some people with 50TB or more hanging off their Plex server. Mine is smaller, about 3.5 TB, but it runs 24x7 using a lower power ultra-mini computer. Well.. actually I have two Plex servers, and the other one does have access to about 8TB. I use it to stage stuff for the 24x7 low power Plex.
I do the same here … almost verbatim the same as you describe … and mostly for the kid shows off PBS.
We're definitely working on enabling drives larger than 2TB. Almost there... Just needs a bit more work!
My 3TB drive is getting aweful lonely just sitting there waiting …
You could give it to me, it would be fine to backup my main desktop/server machine. I could swap you my 1.5TB for it.
Ha! … no its actually dedicated to the TABLO once it actually supports it and I can get my OWN backup drive back which is currently hooked up to the TABLO now.
@mohoelx - it was posted much earlier in this thread by the Syba SY-ENC35026 USB 3.0 Hard Disk Docking Station supports 3.5" and 2.5" Drives works well with Tablo
CONFIRMED: GOOD BRAND NAME: HP PRODUCT NAME: Pocket Media Drive
SIZE (500 GB)
I had this drive that fit into my old HP desktop's Pocket drive bay. The drive is about 4-5 years old. It seems to work so far with the Tablo 2-tuner. The light on the drive stays on solid when not in use, and blinks when being accessed, fyi. I've only had it 1 day, but have recorded and played back about 6 shows without issue.
@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.
I’m pretty sure this is the problem that I’m having with failed recordings. I picked up an Elements drive because I had seen many reports of success using this drive but it is not waking up from “sleep”. Are there and fixes on the WD side? I’ve looked and don’t see any firmware updates for this drive.
I basically can’t stay connected to the tablo so nothing plays and I don’t get all of the thumbnails for all of the shows. This happened for the first time when I was down to around 300GB so I reformatted the drived and now it’s happening again with around 200GB remaining. The Tablo has been working flawlessly otherwise.
CONFIRMED GOOD BRAND: Thermal Take Docking Station and Seagate Drive
PRODUCT NAME: Thermaltake (ST0019U) BlacX 5G + Seagate Barracuda ST31000340AS SIZE: 1 TB COMMENTS: Initial tests are going very well. Drive has been connected since around 12PM two test recordings have been good. Waiting to see what happens with the 4 recordings tonight and the 4 tomorrow night.
