After a couple of weeks, so far so good.
CONFIRMED GOOD
BRAND NAME - Western Digital
PRODUCT NAME - Elements
MPN - WDBWLG0040HBK-04
SIZE - 4 TB
1 Like
Thanks, ‘been thinking of migrating to SSD… Most of us probably have some very old mechanical drives that still work well but a much larger quantity which are dead.
Only a matter of time before 1.5 yrs old drive will soon be 2.5 yrs old and ???
500GB isn’t much but that’s about the what I average on Tablo recordings at any given time. A little extra cleanup time and SSD will probably work forever?
i’m looking for a new 1TB HDD,
can anyone help me to find the best one?
I had a 2 TB Western Digital Elements that worked fine on both a 2 Tuner Tablo and a 4 Tuner. I have since upgraded to a 4 TB WD Elements and it is working fine on my 4 Tuner.
Tablo recommends the WD Elements line and Seagate Expansion line
https://www.tablotv.com/blog/tablo-usb-hard-drive-specifications-suggestions/
Bump
what happened to a new kernel to fix compatibility issues I am an IT tech for a large company and have never seen a product sold that would only work with a few hard drives ,I think that is a real piss poor product if you can’t plug a hard drive into it of any kind and it not work . I just bought a tablo 2 days ago and have been fighting with it with a dozen brands and types of drives and not a one will work , not one mentioned . I have read every dang article on here and nothing fixes my tablo from seeing any drive at all right out of the box this way ,
I have decided it has to be a bad unit and will be returning it but will see if support can do anything on there end first
it is so sad that this is not fixed because this issue with drives has been for years.
it is time you put some money into research and not worrying about anything else until this issue is FIXED
if the rest of you feel the same please tell them by replying to this post
well decided to return unit ,it has to be defective because I have both seagate and wd drive recommended and neither will work , actually any drive I plug into it will even detect or anything I ordered another tablo and will get it Wednesday I will keep you updated on if it works I would think it will
Al
First thing I did when I decided to buy a Tablo was to look at the list of recommended drives supported by Tablo. Bought a WD Elements 2TB, which was the largest supported drive at the time, and have not had a problem.
I did the same with a seagate 2TB usb portable and it has worked fine for 2.5 yrs.
I’m coming up on 2 years now… eventually, I expect the drive will go, but I expect there’s a lot of useful life left to go.
Started with WD Elements 1.5 TB in May and working fine.
CONFIRMED GOOD
BRAND NAME Seagate
PRODUCT NAME Backup Plus
SIZE 4 TB
LINK: amazon.com link
COMMENTS : STDR4000100 model, USB 3.0 (2.0 compatible) powered drive. Works fine.
1 tb wd passport, usb powered, 3 months old
No issues
So I just cut the cord and after much reading went with a Tablo 2 tuner. Got one used off Ebay. Finally hooked it up today. Was unsure what HDD to use so I just plugged in an old laptop hhd 50gb into my cheap $9 enclosure and walah! It was recognized, formatted and up and running with no trouble. Recorded a couple shows and playback was perfect! I am actually amazed at how easy and how well it worked. I am not very tech savvy. Thanks Tablo! No more high cable and dvr fees.
3 Likes
At some point - probably soon than latter - you will want to get something from bigger - 2 to 5 Tb. I always have about 1.3 Tb on my 2 Tb seagate usb portable drive and that seems to work just fine for the two of us. Nice to hear from instant success. 
1 Like
Thank you for the real life info!
Why do you expect the drive will go? There are 40 year old hard drives that still work. I’ve got several that are more than 10 years old (I really should migrate that data to the NAS).
No way to predict when it will fail, but all hard drives will fail eventually, some sooner than others. If you have hard drives that have lasted 40 years, you’ve done well.
I don’t. My oldest working drive is about 25 years old now. But I’ve also got a cluster of 20GB drives in a raid array from sometime around 2000 (I don’t remember when I bought them exactly).
You say there is no way to predict when a drive will fail, true. But there has been a lot of work on trying to figure it out. And yet, they still fail. Partly because a spinning disk that survives the first few years doesn’t have a predicable lifetime. It usually ends up being the controller board (electronics) that die, not the media itself. Most of us know the most common problem with electronics is overheating and frying the chips (or gell-capacitors drying out, but we don’t use those anymore).
CONFIRMED GOOD
BRAND NAME: Samsung
PRODUCT NAME: EVO 850
SIZE: 500 GB
LINK: Samsung Website
Placed in a case from a Seagate Backup Plus Slim (USB3.0).
In a 4 tuner Tablo (with 1Gb of RAM), opening a new channel is as fast as it can get.
2 Likes
CONFIRMED BAD
BRAND NAME: iCan and others
PRODUCT NAME: 2.5" external harddrive enclosure
SIZE: TBD
LINK:
Drives placed in the enclosure based on the ASMT 2115 chipset for SATA to USB 2.0, don’t work. The same Samsung EVO 850 SSD drive, Seagate SSHD and Hitachi hard drive, all failed on that unit, while worked fine in the case of a Seagate slim external hard drive (I have taken the Samsung SpinPoint M9T out for another project). Sympthoms: Tablo sees the drive, when initiating the format the drives disappears. Then a few seconds later, Tablo sees it again and asks if you want to format. You are stuck in that loop rendering the drive unusable with Tablo.
Stay away from generic cheap brands.