Thoughts on using exiting external storage

I will most likely be purchasing a Tablo 4 tuner in the New Year.

My first priority is to test the tuners. I had an extreme amount of trouble with an OTA Tivo Romeo and returned it. It simply could not clearly tune a couple of stations when every other device in my house did.

So the first priority is to test the video. Know that I’ve searched through most of the confusing threads and entries here and other places regarding the storage. Here’s what I already have in my house (although all are currently tasked with backups).

  1. Western Digital WD5000C032 USB 2.0 500 GB?
  2. Western Digital WD10000H1U-00 1TB USB 2.0 (most likely start with this one)
  3. Seagate 9ZH9P9-RAA USB 2.0
  4. Seagate Backup Plus SRD00F2 5TB USB3

Any thoughts on what would/would not work? I watch and immediately delete and never had more than 150 GB of mpeg2 in the can in the past. If one of these could suffice for a couple of months, I can always replace it later.

Thanks in advance.

mjclifford

Tablo tuners…
The Tablo tuners are more sensitive to TV broadcast signals than TV tuners, so you’ll likely have similar issues as you did with the Tivo Romeo.
Users with the most success have high end antennas, are well within their TV broadcast tower antenna’s range, and have zero physical obstructions between their TV antenna and the TV broadcast tower antenna.

I’m not one of those users.
I have a $20 Amazon Basics 35 mile range antenna taped to a wall.
Our TV broadcast tower antennas range from 9 - 20 miles away with walls, trees, and my fat head physically blocking the TV broadcast signals.
Our Tablo receives 6 TV stations clearly, plus 1 that fades out occassionally.
The biggest issue we had was trying to force our Tablo to function with TV stations which had signals too weak for it, or faded in and out too much for it.
Unwilling to spend additional money, or move our antenna to a better location, we’re happy with our setup.
We get all the TV stations we care about.

Tablo hard drives…
There are 2 parameters to consider:

  1. Disk space available for recordings.
    Sounds like you don’t need to worry much about this one, since you estimate you’ll only need around 150GB.

  2. Hard drive disconnects.
    The Tablo has a problem with some older hard drives.
    These drives will appear to function properly with the Tablo, and you may have even used it successfully elsewhere with no issues for years.
    However, you hook it up to the Tablo, and soon the Tablo complains that you have no hard drive connected to it.
    You reboot the Tablo, and it might again see the hard drive, but soon the same thing happens, and it can’t see the hard drive again.
    Sometimes there’s a hard drive firmware update that fixes the hard drive disconnect issue, but not always.
    The Tablo seems to work much better with newer drives, like ones manufactured in 2015 or newer.

Thanks for your reply, Radojevic. As for video, both of the stations are within 7 miles. All of the other video equipment in the house could render the video to be watchable.

The Seagate Backup Plus (last one listed) was purchased from Costco as a backup for the NAS. I remember how peeved I was when I found that the normal option to have the device spin down after activity was permanently removed from this model. What’s great for an infrequent use as a dedicated backup device apparently is a problem for a DVR.

So the question remains to all: Which of the four devices listed specifically will or will not work? I need to focus on the video reception at first and not have the tests confounded by, as Radojevic says, complaints from the Tablo about the firmware on the hard drive.

Heres the link to the tested drives