Apple Tv Hard Drive Upgrade 1tb

1. G-Technology 1TB G-DRIVE mobile USB-C Portable Hard Drive - Next Gallery Image; G-Technology 1TB G-DRIVE mobile USB-C Portable Hard Drive. $79.95 All Colors. Apple Watch TV Music iTunes HomePod iPod touch Apple Card Accessories Gift Cards Apple Store Open Menu Close Menu. Find a Store Shop Online Genius Bar.
2. I have the exact 13' MBP model as OP. I already have 4GB ram + SSD 128GB. I am currently using OS Lion. Considering my MBP goes very slow simply opening different tabs on firefox / chrome / safari, I am thinking if I should further upgrade the ram to 8GB + latest OS.

Drive speed is measured in revolutions per minute (rpm), based on how fast the drive can spin. Most portable hard drives run at 5400 rpm. This reduced power draw helps preserve the battery life of the Mac you plug the drive into. Desktop external hard drives usually run at 7200 rpm to offer all the speed they can.

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:

1. Peel back the rubber cover from the back corners, and about 4' or so back all the way from the front.
2. 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.
3. Remove the cover and unplug the ATA cable from the motherboard.
4. 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.)
5. 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.
6. Unplug the other end of the ATA cable from the drive.
7. Plug the removed drive into an external drive carrier.
8. Plug the drive into your Mac and open Terminal.
9. Run diskutil list and look for a drive that includes the OSBoot and Media partitions. Let's assume it's /dev/disk2.
10. 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.
11. 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.
12. 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.
13. 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.
14. 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.
15. 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.
16. 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.
17. 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.

1tb Sata Hard Drive 2.5

Apple TV Hard Drive Upgrade Guide - A Better Way (IMHO)
(Updated Jan. 12, 2018 for later ATV cloner link)

I created the image below in photoshop from a photo of my Apple TV (after holes were cut) and added dimensions to the screw hole locations. I used English (inch/fractions) rather than decimals since I suspect most owners are more likely to have a ruler handy than a set of calipers. It's possible there's some variation in locations due to mfg tolerances, some (very slight) slop in mtg holes/plate position, etc. but the dimensions below should get you more than close enough to trim away the rubber over the screws using an Xacto knife (or similar). Unfortunately I couldn't find my Xacto knife (with a nice sharp/tapered edge) and used an old razor knife (with snap-off tips) that had been broken square instead of on an angle, so my cuts were not 'pretty'. But since the bottom area is never seen in use it's no big deal. (I could have used adhesive felt dots, etc. to cover the holes but why bother.)
(If I really wanted nearly perfect cuts I'd have dug harder to find an old Leather hole punch I had from years ago with a rotating wheel of various hole sizes. Using that (perhaps even heated) with the proper size hole punch (appx 1/4in dia screw heads) could have made nearly perfect cutouts perhaps - but again it's really not a big deal anyway.

Use the above pix as a guide to locate the screws using a ruler and mark (+) the locations with a pen or pencil. Apple store virus scan. (You can wipe the marks off later.) Using an Xacto knife (preferably) cut through the rubber cover (it's not very thick over the screws) - and with a sharp knife, you can literally use the edges of the screw to guide a circular cutout around the screw heads if you're careful. The screw head diameter is appx 1/4in, I just used the border of the screw head as a 'guide' for my knife (blade against the edge of the screw head) as I cut around them. (Again how 'pretty' the cutout is really doesn't matter since its hidden in use.)

Once you have the screws exposed, it's simply a matter of removing the Torx screws. On my early 40GB ATV, the outer 4 screws are T10, the inner 4 used to secure the hard drive are T9. One reader says his 40GB ATV has T8 HD screws, but I TRIPLE checked mine again - a T9 fits the HD screws without any slop. (I can remove the screws with the next size down, but the sizes I mention are the best fit for my sample anyway. I'm using a Kobalt 8-in-1 Precision Torx Head Screwdriver I bought from Lowes last fall.)
Remove the outer 4 screws first, which will allow the bottom plate to be removed while still having the hard drive retained to the bottom plate. (Note: The 2 screws on the Ports end are fully threaded, unlike the pair on the opposite end - you can see why in the photo below which shows the difference in standoff lengths the screws pass through.)

When removing the bottom plate, take care to not overly stress the hard drive's ribbon cable from the motherboard. The motherboard is secured to the top surface and a folded IDE (PATA) ribbon cable runs from it to the hard drive mounted on the bottom plate as shown in the photo below:

Notice the (adhesive backed) gray pad attached to the corner of the OEM hard drive's top cover. (You'll remove this to transfer to the new HD, although I forgot to do that initially, I did later. Another reason why the exposed screws are a plus - no ripping off/regluing the cover.)
Once you have the covers apart, remove the 4 screws securing the OEM hard drive to the bottom plate. (I found it easier to remove the IDE cable after removing the screws.) The photo below shows me holding the OEM 40GB (Fujitsu btw) and you can see the rubber sheet attached to the bottom of it (insulator sheet between the HD and the bottom metal cover). You'll remove this sheet (and the foam pad on the top corner of the HD) for transferring to the new drive.

In the above photo you can see the CPU fan and to the left of it, the wireless (mini-PCIe) card. (One of the future mods (for 1080P content playback) I may consider is replacing the wireless card with a Crystal video card and using XMBC with drivers for it.)

This photo shows peeling off the green (rubber) insulation sheet from the OEM hard drive to apply it to the new drive.

Cloning the OEM Hard Drive: (AtvCloner source updated January 12th, 2018.)
And as other readers have noted before, a big thanks to Dynaflash for their freeware ATVcloner app (see note below) that eliminates the need to use terminal commands (that were shown in HD upgrade guides I linked to years ago here).
The download link for AtvCloner App I originally used in 2010 went MIA. In 2012 a reader (James S.) then sent his Snow Leopard and Leopard version dropbox links in 2012 here for those needing it. On January 11th, 2018 I received this mail with another source. (I used the original source, but no longer have it. I've not used the app from any other source since then.)

1tb Hard Drive For Pc

Users could stll get it from my github page https://github.com/dynaflash/AtvCloner/blob/master/AtvCloner.app.zip if they want. I am still using it periodically on macos 10.13 so it seems to still work just fine.
Regards, Joe'

IIRC, later iTunes versions don't support the Apple TV Gen 1. (iTunes 11 and later? Can't recall now, but have seen some reports in Apple's forums over the years from Apple TV Gen 1 users with later iTunes versions.)

Since the Apple TV uses PATA (not SATA) drives, I used a NewerTech USB universal drive adapter that I've had for years to mount the OEM drive in OS X. ATVcloner made cloning the OEM partitions and prepping the new 320GB WD Scorpio PATA drive a breeze. (I used OS X 10.5.8 and the Leopard version of ATVcloner.) The photo below is of the OEM drive connected to my Mac Pro USB port using the NewerTech Universal Drive Adapter. (After imaging the original drive I used the same adapter for prepping the new drive.)

Once you've cloned the partitions to the new drive. It's simply a matter of attaching the insulation sheet to the bottom of the new drive and the pad to the top corner of it. Then connect the IDE cable and attach the new drive to the bottom plate using the 4 screws removed earlier.

Now just mate the bottom cover and secure it using the 4 screws.

BTW: I did not wipe/restore the OEM HD before doing this as it's not necessary. On first use with the new drive installed (be patient on first power-up), you're prompted to go through the initial setup again. (Including iTunes code entry, etc.) And for those like me with over 200GB of media to sync to the new drive, I'd suggest an ethernet connection rather than wireless. Although the Apple TV's ethernet port is only 100 Mbit max, Ethernet is more efficient than the built-in wireless, but it's still going to take awhile. (With my 5GHz/wide/300 Mbit link it took about 24 hours to sync 293GB of content. I literally filled the drive initially to where I had 'zero bytes' free, but later deleted some content to free up a couple GB.)

Hopefully the above is useful for anyone else that has wanted to upgrade their first generation Apple TV hard drive but kept putting it off. Printer adapter for macbook pro. If you have any questions or comments, let me know (news at xlr8yourmac.com).
-Mike