“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.
@rahrens
“The specs on photo formats don’t mention RAW photos… That would be a deal breaker for me.”
The specs also didn’t mention anything about the hard drive being user upgradeable either.
Have you thought about writing Apple to ask about RAW? If you do, bring the news back here.
To Confirm.I have Apple TV and shoot a ton of Raw images. They do work with Apple TV.
The question remains: Which RAW format, there are quite a few.
Johann;
I wasn’t “passing myself off as too good”. I happen to have 3500+ RAW formatted photos, and if they wouldn’t play on the AppleTV, then it just wouldn’t work for me. How is that “too good”?
People that shoot RAW (not all pros, I’m NOT one) do so because we can do better post processing of the images. It doesn’t mean we didn’t shoot the pic well, it means we want to do something different with the photo than just tweak contrast and brightness.
I was concerned, because the AppleTV specifically did not include RAW as an acceptable format. I know that there are many different formats, and you need to be able to deal with the particular version that is produced by your model camera. But iPhoto is plugged (by Apple) to be able to handle the D70 RAW I use, so I was curious.
Mr Reeee; I am not “stuck” with iPhoto; I choose to use it at this point. In a couple of years when my current crop of Macs get too long in the tooth, I’ll buy something new that will handle something like Aperture, but mine won’t right now. (I made a conscious choice to buy a MacBook instead of the Pro, for financial reasons)
Thanks to dsaponaro, it is good to know it will handle the RAW. I will watch that for a while tho, I’m saving my nickels for Leopard first.
MW: needs, as in this thing has to meet my needs or I don’t need it. (Not a criticism, I think it’s a cool item, I just want to know that it’ll work before plunking down the green!)
Thanks to all who answered!
@Mr. Reese
Is iView Media Pro “Bonjour” compliant? Any of these professional solutions would be wise to adopt Apple’s ZeroConfig networking protocols so they share with iPhoto and TV.
“Can anyone explain why a 120GB HD results in ≈107GB space?”
Because there is a smaller modified version of OS X installed on the HDD.
“”Can anyone explain why a 120GB HD results in ≈107GB space?”
Because there is a smaller modified version of OS X installed on the HDD.”
And because HD manufacturers state capacity in mythical sizes, where a GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes, instead of the 1,073,741,824 bytes a computer uses to represent a GB.
Marketers think base-2 math is too hard for your feeble brain to comprehend, so they don’t use it. Besides, it makes their products look better.
mcl is correct. When you calculate 120,000,000,000 bytes (120GB in base-10) ÷ 1024 ÷ 1024 ÷ 1024 = 111.75 so AppleTV’s OS takes up around 4GB.
My MacBook Pro has a 120GB hard disk in it, and it shows up as having a capacity of 111.47GB. In computer terms, 1KB is 1024 Bytes, 1MB is 1024 KB and 1GB is 1024 MB.
rahrens:
Just so you know, Aperture runs just great on my C2D Macbook with 2GB of RAM. You may be surprised at how usable it actually can be on a Macbook.
Isn’t iTunes actually pre-scaling the iPhoto images for presentation on AppleTV (like it does for iPod), so the issue of RAW is not relevant, as iPhoto might be handling that end of things, not AppleTV.
Just wondering on rahrens’ behalf.