AppleTV Take Two August 9, 2008
Posted by Drew in : Technology , trackbackSo I wrote way back when about my purchase of the Apple TV and how for me it was exactly what I needed. In my original assessment I didn’t think that the original lowly 40Gb hard drive was going to be a problem but as with all things storage related the amount that is available soon fills and there is never enough. Once I started using the Apple TV in anger, especially with video content, the small drive was not suitable for a synchronising set up and whether this was a serious issue was going to be down to the wireless streaming capabilities. Well after using it for several months I can tell you that it is a problem. Here’s the deal; I have 802.11n in my house and it works fine upstairs and downstairs for all sorts of things, the obvious email/web browsing, XBox Live from upstairs works fine. But streaming high quality video? Not a chance. Not that this is necessarily an Apple TV issue. My video library is currently sat attached to a poor old Mac Mini which only runs 802.11g so that could be the bottleneck but whatever the reason I found that streaming was hit and miss. To add insult to injury, the more people in the house the worse the experience which means all my boasting about this technological marvel was quite rightly thrown right back in my face.
So I realised that what I needed to do was upgrade the hard drive to allow more to be stored on the Apple TV itself. Within months Apple themselves had realised the error of their ways and launched a 160Gb model. Of course there is no trade up mechanism. You got in early, you suffer. Thanks Steve. To make matters worse, what is essentially a trivial hard drive upgrade is made complicated by a software image that can’t easily be replicated on a new drive. There are plenty of sites that will give you chapter and verse on how to undertake such an upgrade but to be honest it all sounded like too much of a faff. It was therefore with some delight that I came across a website belonging to The Powerbook Fanatic that has a whole host of Apple related upgrade options, including the Apple TV hard drive. What’s more, they even offer an even more spacious 250Gb version which outdoes the top spec model from Apple.
There are two options available for the upgrade, home or away. If you don’t want to get involved in any of the hassle the away service allows the entire Apple TV to be sent to the company who will perform the upgrade and send it back. I however chose the cheaper home option which simply involves them sending a ready prepared hard drive for you to fit yourself. The biggest problem with getting into the Apple TV, a feature shared with the Mac Mini, is that there is a plastic cover on the base of the unit that is glued on and does it’s level best to defy any attempt to remove it. To be honest, my unit now has three separate pieces to its cover as I couldn’t get it off in one go. Fortunately this only becomes apparent if you turn the unit over so it’s not a huge problem. Once the plastic is removed however the rest of the upgrade is fairly straightforward. The screws in the unit are not the bog standard type, Apple in common with many manufacturers have opted for hex screws so you’ll need the appropriate hex bits but these are fairly standard in most screwdriver bit kits. Four screws get you inside the box and then all there is to do is to take out the original drive and stick in the new one. One word of warning here, there is a spacer stuck on the original drive that keeps the drive casing and the boxes metal case apart, don’t forget to swap this to the new drive or you may find as I did that the unit won’t boot. As soon as I realised I’d missed this I popped it onto the new drive, reassembled the box and all was well. Once swapped the unit simply boots up and is a virgin Apple TV once more.
Re-synching the device does of course take an age, especially as I have now synched a load of TV shows and movies making full use of the new drive. The added on-box content has overcome the previous requirement for streaming. By choosing the movies to synch manually I can keep my favourites on there permanently and just add others when I want to watch them. This has breathed new life into the Apple TV and it once again serves my needs exactly. The service from The Powerbook Fanatic was excellent and I can heartily recommend them to anyone wanting an upgrade.
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