Ok, not really. But it can be. And for pretty cheap.
For those who've been following this forum for the past few weeks you've seen a couple of threads about connecting a 3.5" drive to the Apple TV. I have done it, and it works.
First thing I did was to put the ATV drive image onto the 3.5" drive using a commonly-employed method. I have an image of my original 1.0 ATV drive sitting on my Mac's hard drive. After I put the image onto the 3.5" drive, I used iPartion to expand the Media partition of the drive. This made a clone of my original 40 gig ATV drive, except for the larger Media partition.
Balamw turned me onto the 2.5" to 3.5" IDE adapter and I found one at PC Connection for only $4.70. I had to punch a hole in this adapter with a pin (below the 'x' in photo atv1.jpg) to take a pin from the ATV logic board, but that's all I really had to do. I connected a standard ribbon cable that ships with all IDE internal drives between the adapter and an old IBM 80 gig drive that I had laying around, gave it a power source, and that was it.
All one would have to do is buy a 750 gig PATA drive (the largest currently available), the adapter and a cheap external enclosure to power the 3.5" drive - all for about $160. Put the ATV and new drive in a place that would be protected from accidents and you'd have a lot of hard drive space. Who knows, you might even be able to initialize two 750 gig drives as a single 1.5 TB volume using master/slave configuration off of the drive. Tiger (the ATV's OS) supports it, so I suspect it would work.
My ATV has been put back together with its rather anemic 160 gig hard drive. Not sure if I'll go ahead with a permanent mod. But who knows? Now that we have 720 content and Handbrake 0.9.2 with AC3 audio, it might be worth while.
And I guarantee you, if I were buying an ATV today I'd pick up the 40 gig model and spend the savings on a 750 gig external drive.
For those who've been following this forum for the past few weeks you've seen a couple of threads about connecting a 3.5" drive to the Apple TV. I have done it, and it works.
First thing I did was to put the ATV drive image onto the 3.5" drive using a commonly-employed method. I have an image of my original 1.0 ATV drive sitting on my Mac's hard drive. After I put the image onto the 3.5" drive, I used iPartion to expand the Media partition of the drive. This made a clone of my original 40 gig ATV drive, except for the larger Media partition.
Balamw turned me onto the 2.5" to 3.5" IDE adapter and I found one at PC Connection for only $4.70. I had to punch a hole in this adapter with a pin (below the 'x' in photo atv1.jpg) to take a pin from the ATV logic board, but that's all I really had to do. I connected a standard ribbon cable that ships with all IDE internal drives between the adapter and an old IBM 80 gig drive that I had laying around, gave it a power source, and that was it.
All one would have to do is buy a 750 gig PATA drive (the largest currently available), the adapter and a cheap external enclosure to power the 3.5" drive - all for about $160. Put the ATV and new drive in a place that would be protected from accidents and you'd have a lot of hard drive space. Who knows, you might even be able to initialize two 750 gig drives as a single 1.5 TB volume using master/slave configuration off of the drive. Tiger (the ATV's OS) supports it, so I suspect it would work.
My ATV has been put back together with its rather anemic 160 gig hard drive. Not sure if I'll go ahead with a permanent mod. But who knows? Now that we have 720 content and Handbrake 0.9.2 with AC3 audio, it might be worth while.
And I guarantee you, if I were buying an ATV today I'd pick up the 40 gig model and spend the savings on a 750 gig external drive.
tv becuase the 40 gig fits my price point but i'd ideally want to rip *ALL* of my DVD's into my 
