Back in March, I purchased one of the original 40GB Apple TV units, and put it to use in our living room on the big screen TV. It worked fine, but 40GB was just too confining--between music and photos, I had over 40GB of data, not even counting movies or other video stuff. As a result, if I wanted access to everything from the Apple TV, I had to make sure the Mac Pro was awake to stream more content to the Apple TV. This got old fast, so I finally forced myself to upgrade the hard drive in the Apple TV today.
Overall, the process was relatively simple. I'm going to document the steps here, just in case the article I relied upon vanishes in the future. If you're going to undertake this project yourself, you'll need the following:
- Towel: to place the top side of the Apple TV onto after you've opened it.
- Torx screwdrivers: sizes 8 and 10, needed to open the case and release the hard drive.
- 2.5" ATA laptop hard drive: Make sure it's not a SATA drive; I went with this 120GB Fujitsu, though I bought mine at Fry's.
- 2.5" external drive enclosure: I bought this unit at the local PC Club store. I wanted a FireWire case, not just USB2, as I've never been impressed with USB2 speeds on OS X. Now that I'm done with the project, the Apple TV's old 40GB drive is living in the enclosure.
The rest of the process is documented below; read on and modify at your own risk!
Macworld's own Dan Frakes wrote in great detail about his Apple TV drive upgrade experiences, so that's where I started. He chose to duplicate his 40GB drive first, though, which I didn't really want to wait through. Instead, I was interested in duplicating just enough of the drive to get the job done. One of Dan's links, to this story on Engadget, explained how to do that. With that background out of the way, here's exactly what I had to do to upgrade my Apple TV:
- Peel back the rubber cover from the back corners, and about 4" or so back all the way from the front.
- Remove the four corner screws, and note that the two in the front are longer than the two in the back. Lots of pictures of this part of the process at the above two links.
- Remove the cover and unplug the ATA cable from the motherboard.
- Undo the screws that hold the drive to the bottom of the Apple TV. (You'll have to peel back about 4" of the cover from the front.)
- Remove the sticky pad on the top of the drive, as well as the small padded sticky on the other corner of the drive. Save these for later.
- Unplug the other end of the ATA cable from the drive.
- Plug the removed drive into an external drive carrier.
- Plug the drive into your Mac and open Terminal.
- Run diskutil list and look for a drive that includes the OSBoot and Media partitions. Let's assume it's /dev/disk2.
- At this point, you need to duplicate the entire drive, and the Unix tool dd is the best way to do that. You have two choices: you can create an exact duplicate of the 40GB drive, or you can duplicate only as much as you need to make your new drive usable. Either way, most of the command is identical:
dd if=/dev/disk2 of=/path/to/new/AppleTV.img bs=1024k
If you just want to copy enough of the drive to make the new drive (which is much faster, as you're copying about 1.3GB instead of 40GB), append count=1335 to the end of the above command. Replace /path/to/new/AppleTV.img with the path to the location where you'd like to save the disk image. - Unmount the drive, then swap your new larger disk into your external carrier and reconnect it. If OS X asks to initialize the disk, just tell it to ignore it. Open Terminal again.
- Run this command to copy the image onto the new disk:
dd if=/path/to/new/AppleTV.img count=1335 of=/dev/disk2 bs=1024k
This will take a few minutes (if you copied 1.3GB) or maybe a few hours (if you copied all 40GB). When it's done, you'll see a message about how many bytes were transferred. - Now comes the voodoo that I basically don't understand :). We're going to use the gpt (GUID partition table maintenance utility) to tweak the Media partition to use all the free space on the new disk. Run the following Terminal commands:
$ diskutil eject disk2
$ gpt remove -i 4 disk2
$ diskutil eject disk2
$ gpt show disk2
When you run that last command, you'll see output similar to that of diskutil list. Immediately above the row that contains Sec GPT table, you'll see a line that only has entries in the start and size columns. Note the number in the start column from that row. (There's a picture of this on Engadget's site.) For this demo, assume the number was 5125000. - Now run these Terminal commands:
$ diskutil eject disk2
$ gpt add -b 5125000 -i 4 -t hfs /dev/disk2
$ diskutil eraseVolume "Journaled HFS+" Media /dev/disk2s4
When this process is finished, you're nearly done. - Remove any .Spotlight folders on the new drive with these two commands. (Be very careful; any typos could cause you to delete a bunch of stuff you'd really rather keep!)
$ sudo rm -rf /Volumes/OSBoot/.Spotlight-V100
$ sudo rm -rf /Volumes/Media/.Spotlight-V100
You could also do this using a tool like Spotless, which is definitely the safer way to do it. - Finally, eject the disk one last time (diskutil eject disk2), and then unplug it from your Mac and remove it from the external drive enclosure.
- Install the drive in the Apple TV, taking care to replace both the pads you removed, and to use the longer screws on the front of the Apple TV case.
That's it--you should be done! Plug the Apple TV back in, power it up, and wait for the silver Apple logo. Mine worked on the first try, though I had to reestablish the wireless connection. After that, it paired with iTunes on the Mac Pro and started sucking over content. Now I've got all my photos, movies, music, and television shows on the Apple TV, and I've still got about 65GB left for future expansion.
If you have some patience and aren't completely mortified by working in Terminal, this should be a relatively easy upgrade--I thought it was going to be much tougher than it turned out to be. But, as you're probably expecting, remember you'll be voiding your warranty if you try this, and any damage you cause is your fault, not mine. I strongly suggest you read Dan's article and the post at Engadget for more detail and photographs. I greatly summarized things here, just so I'd have it all in one place if I needed it again.