“In case you were wondering, it is possible to upgrade that measly 40GB hard drive on Apple TV, in this case to 120GB. Tipster Jonathan Bare says he’s done it, resulting in a capacity of 107.36GB. Now that’s more like it,” Gizmodo reports.
“He sent along these two pictures showing the results of his hard drive upgrade, with a promise to tell us how he did it later on today,” Gizmodo reports.
Full article, with images, here.
Related articles:
Apple TV dissection photos – March 22, 2007
Apple posts Apple TV User’s Guide online – March 22, 2007
No shock there. I’ll make sure and pick up that 160GB drive along with my Apple TV next week…
What I’m interested in is: Is the operating system for the Apple TV stored on the HD, or in ROM? Did the person upgrading the HD have to copy the contents from the old HD to the new HD, and what did those contents look like?
Now we’re talking.
why not 500GB
@marten
The hard drive is a 2.5″ notebook drive. They don’t make them in 500GB…. yet.
why not 500 GB, because the drive is probably a 2.5″ drive…
i think it’s a 1.8 drive, no?
Something that’s been bothering me.
The specs on photo formats don’t mention RAW photos, but iPhoto has been updated to handle RAW formats for a wide variety of cameras. I shoot RAW, because of the advantages in post processing it gives me, and about half of my 6500+ shots are in RAW.
Does this mean that the AppleTV won’t process those photos, even tho iPhoto does?
That would be a deal breaker for me.
rahrens, You must realize that Apple tv is a consumer device and probably 99% of average consumers don’t shoot RAW pics.
@rahrens
what are you doing shooting camera raw and using iPhoto? if you’re using iPhoto as your photo app, don’t try to pass yourself off as too good for appletv because it doesn’t do raw. a lot of pros use JPG by the way – they just make sure to shoot it properly so there’s no need for correction.
You should be able to upgrade this to any capacity drive that supports a PATA interface, you’ll just have to leave it outside the box for 3.5″ drives.
Can anyone explain why a 120GB HD results in ≈107GB space?
What does the stock 40 GB HD give you, ≈27 GB?
Does the system take up ≈ 12GB?
Just curious.
If you look at the pictures the iTunes window actually shows that the guy has some video and audio already on th Apple TV harddrive…
…Sorry my bad… that WAS the overall capacity…
I think there will be a 200GB x 5400rpm x 2.5″ drive available soon, too.
Adding a 160GB x 7200 rpm drive would be a nice upgrade. Then just pop that 40GB weenie drive into an external FireWire case and you’re DONE.
It’s a shame that you’re stuck using crappy old iPhoto with Apple TV. I use iView Media Pro for my photo catalogues and there’s no way I’d start managing a separate iPhoto archive. I mean there’s next to Zero control over how and where photos are stored. They’re just short of inaccessible from the Finder… unless I want to drill down through mysteriously named folders!
But, I shouldn’t complain this thing clearly isn’t designed for my wants or needs. Dedicating a Mac to my HDTV makes more sense.