What is my Tablo doing?

Support & Troubleshooting
1

I don’t know what’s going on but all the clients are disconnected and powered down for the night and for some reason, the Tablo is really working the external hard drive. Since the Tablo is running Linux, is there a way to ssh in and run ‘top’ or ‘htop’ to see what process is putting in so many I/O requests?

Just to clarify, the HDD is going nuts (I can really hear it working), no recordings are scheduled for this time and no clients are connected.

I’ve also noticed that the amount of used space on the HDD has increased a bit.

Could it be a buffer for one of the tuners?

About the tuners, how do I release them? If I select channel ‘2-1’ and it tunes to that channel and I don’t want to use it anymore, is there a way to clear it so they just ‘turn off’ instead of always being locked on that last used channel?

2

So are you saying that you are watching live TV and when you are done you don’t back out of Live TV and the grid(back to the main menu), you just turn the device off?

3

On the Roku app, I just go to ‘disconnect’ every time I am done watching Live TV or am I supposed to go to ‘exit’?

I ended up unplugging the Tablo from the electrical outlet, it was working the hard drive way too much for no reason at all.

4

I hope you pressed the reset button before unplugging. The reset button gives Tablo a chance for a graceful shutdown.

5

If a channel that was tuned isn’t being watched or recorded, the Tablo will release it automatically (usually within an hour). A reboot will obviously clear all channels too, though there usually is no need for that.

6

I’m not a developer nor an expert in any way, but I do know the Tablo does things like processing recent recordings (generate thumbnails), commercial skip, and general maintenance activity during times when it is not actively being watched. Not sure I’d expect “heavy” disk usage for an extended period of time, but can’t say I’ve ever paid any attention to mine, either. The disk is tucked away out of sight / out of mind.

7

Ahh crap. I just pulled the plug. I didn’t think these things had a shutdown button.

8

Yes, when finished watching the Tablo , you should hit “exit” on the Roku app. Hitting “disconnect” will completely disconnect the Tablo, requiring you to “connect” back to it when using again.

9

Would a ‘guide update’ really work the hard drive?

10

@robman501a - If you were watching live TV, the tuners can remain active for about an hour as @snowcat mentioned.

Additional processes like fast-forward preview generation and automatic commercial skip processing are done once tuners are available (i.e. not watching/recording anything).

Overnight maintenance also includes some database cleanup.

So long story short, your drive could have been doing any number of things.

11

Hmm… okay, now I’m concerned. Since I pulled the plug when it was in the middle of doing something, how could I tell if I caused any file system problems?

12

The support team can check on that for you but we usually don’t see more serious problems happen unless people start poking at the drive via their PC, or dropping the drive.

13

Good to know!! A lot of my trouble could be that I had been keeping my tuners(2) busy ALL the time. Now that I’ve stopped doing that (for the last week or so) things have been working much better.

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