Today’s question comes from Bruce, who asks, “Can I expand the recording storage on my Tablo? There are a few older series I’m recording and I keep running out of space.”
Yes! You can easily expand the recording storage space on your 4th Generation Tablo from 50 hours to more than 1000 hours, without losing your existing recordings.
All you need to do is purchase and connect a compatible portable USB hard drive between 1TB and 8TB in size. These are widely available and cost as little as $60.
Larger drives typically have separate power supplies, but smaller drives can be powered by the Tablo itself. Avoid USB thumb drives, network-attached storage (NAS) and internal drives in external enclosures, as they’re not supported.
Formatting the Drive
Once you’ve connected the drive to the USB port on the rear of the Tablo, go to SETTINGS > STORAGE in the Tablo app to format the drive for use with your DVR. Once that’s done, you’ll see your new storage capacity reflected.
After connecting an external hard drive, you can still watch and manage existing recordings on the 4th Generation Tablo’s internal storage, but new recordings will be saved to the external drive.
If you haven’t set up your 4th Generation Tablo yet, complete setup before you connect and format an external hard drive.
Additional Benefits of Expanded Recording Storage
Beyond allowing you to save entire TV series, tons of movies, or create a catalog of games from your favorite team, expanding your 4th Generation Tablo’s storage has additional benefits, including:
- More Recording Flexibility
When using onboard storage, your 4th generation Tablo device is limited to recording approximately 8 hours of content within a 24-hour period. This is due to the archiving process which helps extend and manage onboard recording storage space.If you regularly record super long programs like golf or multiple movies in a single day, we recommend connecting a USB hard drive so you can enjoy the flexibility of recording additional hours of content.
- Preserving Original Video Quality
The archiving process the 4th generation Tablo device uses for onboard storage will also transform antenna TV recordings from the original MPEG2 broadcast to smaller MPEG4 files. While the video quality is still excellent on archived recordings, sports fans and those with eagle eyes may notice some reduction in overall sharpness on recordings saved to onboard storage.
Recordings saved to external storage on the 4th generation Tablo device are not archived and are preserved in their original broadcast quality.
If you’re ready to expand your Tablo’s recording storage space, head over to the Tablo Knowledge Base for step-by-step instructions and hard drive specs and recommendations.
