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ATV hard drive upgrade a success!

DVNIEL

DVNIEL

Cancelled
Original poster
Oct 28, 2003
949
579
I'm just really stoked that I was able to upgrade my ATV's harddrive, that I had to share it with the Mac community. I got a 160GB Seagate PATA drive from Fry's for $129 with $20 MIR, and a nice Nexus USB 2.0 enclosure to do the switch.

I got home, took apart the ATV, plopped the hard drive into the enclosure and followed these steps:
Terminal Dump for Apple TV

After that I plugged it into my dad's Sony HDTV, did a factory restore, and now have 147GB available for wasting=).

So now my ATV has quadruple the memory, and I have a nice 40GB external drive to take on the road, all for a mere $120. I am a little sad about voiding my warranty, but eh, at least I have 5-year warranty on the hard drive.

I'm not that tech savvy with taking things apart, so this goes to show that pretty much anyone that can follow directions is capable of doing it. I hope you guys have fun doing the swap as much as I did.
 
Be careful. I came back from my trip to the store to find that my AppleTV had an icon in the middle of the screen that looked like an AppleTV. It had a blinking question mark over it.

Clearly the drive heated up too much in the case and the AppleTV lost the drive. I unplugged it, let it cool down (it *was* a little on the hot side), and it's fine again.

I loaded in a 160GB Seagate as well.

-Rob
 
Uh oh, thanks for the warning, hhmm... were we a little overzealous in choosing the 160GB HD?

To those that have done the upgrade, what HD did you use and how is your ATV holding up?
 
Probably. Most of the upgrades I've seen people do are for 80GB.

In fact, now that I have the unit hacked, and am mounting file shares over the network and using ATVFiles to access them, I'm seeing less and less reason to have a larger hard drive in the unit. I don't think I'm going to keep much, if any, content on the device itself.

So, I may put the 40GB (after applying updates) back in the box.

However, I did find out that holding down the Play button on the remote will "sleep" the unit, so I'm programming my Harmony to do that automatically when I press "Off". That way the unit is really only "on" when I'm watching it.

-Rob
 
villanova329 said:
Uh oh, thanks for the warning, hhmm... were we a little overzealous in choosing the 160GB HD?
Click to expand...

I sent my :apple: TV out for the upgrade because I wasn't comfortable doing it myself. They put in the 160 gig unit and I haven't had any problems with excess heat.

For those willing to spend more for an upgrade, I can recommend iResQ without hesitation.
 
You Paid Way Too Much For That 160GB HD From What Fry's?

I don't know which Fry's you got that drive from, but you paid a rediculous amount of money for it. This weekend through tomorrow Fry's is selling 500GB SATAII/300 16MB buffered HDs for $120 no rebate. Is the :apple:TV HD only PATA IDE? In any event they have been selling PATA/100 400GB Seagates for $100 no rebate since last October. $120 after rebate for a 160 is outrageously high.
 
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