Are there any instructions anywhere online that will help me upgrade the hard drive in my AppleTV?
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Upgrading AppleTV Hard Drive or external Hard Drive?
- Thread starter gazfocus
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Here's a decent set of instructions and pictures. I've never tried it though, so you're on your own.
I strongly suggest you buy iPartition. The cl has caused problems for many people when trying to properly partition the new drive.
Would it be possible to use an external drive with it or say a NAS drive purely with the apple tv (i.e. no computer involved)?
You'll always need a computer with iTunes to sync or stream to it.
You could also use a 750 gig drive for it, so long as you could fabricate or buy a 2.5" PATA to 3.5" PATA cable and run it out of the ATV to the 3.5" drive in another enclosure. This is what really annoys me about Apple: why didn't they put a SATA drive in there? Life would be so much nicer.
When the upgrade comes out, I won't need a PC with it because it will be used for Movie Rentals and Buying TV Shows etc over WiFi. Also, my plan is to sync my iTunes/Apple TV every so often so that it won't rely on my PC being on.
Also, as someone else pointed out, there would be a problem with creating the partitions which other people have had so i'd rather not change the drive if there's another way around it.
I upgraded a 40 to 160 gb drive without problems. The instructions are on engadgit I think
Basically I took the old drive out of the ATV and connected it to the mac using an external drive case. Then using some command line magic created 3 files which contained images of the 3 existing partitions. these were saved to the mac.
The new drive was now attached to the mac, the original being put away for safe keeping and the 2 or 3 partion images restored to the new drive. The drive was put back to the ATV and that was it. took about an hour I guess.
Easy to do, if you can follow instructions. Try here http://wiki.awkwardtv.org/wiki/Prepare_a_Hard_Drive