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My 750 gig Apple TV

Cave Man, its in its infancy, but realize there is alot of reasons coming up to push forth with the atv eSata mod. :)
 
One thing you guys could do is get one of these. If you want to be fancy, you can use a relay to turn on the external PSU when the Apple TV turns on.

Basically the 5v from the mini will control on/off for the 3.5" HD.

Something like this would do the trick:

http://www.sidewindercomputers.com/pumrelswitki.html

Cheaper examples of both the USB -> ATA adapter and the relay kit exist. The relay can also be made from parts.
 
um. why ? I mean the esata drive is controlled via a signal through the bridge from the atv. afaik that would not really help with anything I am aware of. Um, and we are not using this with a mini, its an AppleTV.
 
In business!

OK, I am now enjoying eSATA on my ATV. It looks like the StarTech PATA2SATA bridge is not doable. The one dyna found seems to be the solution to the problem I had. My eSATA drive now running my ATV using the Syba bridge (SY-IDE-SATA) purchased for $11.89 from OutletPC.

The walnut base that I made in my shop has an eSATA plate on the back. The corners were rounded with a 3/8" round-over bit, but the ATV looks to be more like a 1/2" round-over. I may get it right one day, but for now I'm going to just enjoy it as is.

The ribbon cable did give me some trouble at first. For some reason, it would only start the boot, but not finish it. I connected the bridge and adapter directly to the ATV's PATA connector and it booted just fine. Put the ribbon in between again and it's now booted four times without a problem. Not sure what could have caused that, but it seems to be stable.

Of course, the three principal advantages of this mod are:

1. A lot more storage space compared to any internal drive.
2. Extremely fast operation; even 3x ff is silky-smooth. The drive I have is a 7200 rpm with 32 mb cache and the SATA controller is 1.5 gb/s. It blows USB drives out of the water.
3. If you ever need to retrieve files off the ATV (say, oh, I don't know, maybe a high-def movie rental just to peek at it) or mod the OS, it's very easy. Just buy an enclosure that has both eSATA and USB (or FW) and go between the ATV and your Mac. No patchstick mods or anything else.

I also discovered that Disk Utility's restore function can be used to create a bootable OSBoot partition on the ATV's drive. I dragged and dropped the 2.0.2 disk image that I downloaded from Apple, and Disk Utility built me a bootable partition in less than 3 minutes.

Attached are a few images of my completed setup.
 

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That's an awesome looking setup Cave Man. Weird about the controller, I guess it's an issue with power requirements when the cable is added :S
 
It looks like it might not be but I regonise it from somewhere futuristic or are you on about something else.
 
Way cool Cave Man :) So now we have two different methods to mod the case, one low profile and one with a nice female socket in the back. Awesome! Gotta say it would be tough to go back to the pata drive now. Its an excellent mod and I would do it again in a heartbeat. btw, two days ago I synced another 100 + GB of HB goodness to my AppleTV eSata and it is smooth like butter :)
 
Caveman & Dyna,

You guys rock!

I am tres jealous. :D

I have enjoyed watching you two work through this, and I appreciate your sharing it. Well done.

-- Mikie
 
So I decided to go ahead and do this to my :apple:TV. I've got all the hardware working and hooked up and I loaded the software following one of the guides. But when I plug turn it on, it boots to the restore menu. I try a Factory Restore and it goes through the progress bar and restarts, but then it just sits at the Apple logo. I'm going to try to go through the software load again sometime this week.
 
Have you tried this ? Unplug both the atv and the hard drive. Plug the hard drive in first, and when you hear it spool up. Then plug in the atv. It seems like if the atv cannot find its startup drive (like you forgot to fire up the esata drive) once that question mark logo hits it quits looking. Make sure the eSata drive is running before you fire up the atv.
 
dynaflash said:
Have you tried this ? Unplug both the atv and the hard drive. Plug the hard drive in first, and when you hear it spool up. Then plug in the atv. It seems like if the atv cannot find its startup drive (like you forgot to fire up the esata drive) once that question mark logo hits it quits looking. Make sure the eSata drive is running before you fire up the atv.
Click to expand...

I'm not getting the question mark, it's just sitting on the Apple logo. I know it can see the drive because it will let me to a restore and I can hear the drive working.
 
OH, thats weird. Well, at least you know your getting the drive detected and in fact working. Maybe something in error with how you imaged the drive ?
 
On the plus side, at least its wickedly easy to do since you no longer have to open up your atv case to attache your drive to your mac. :)
 
alFR said:
Or unless you've got a laptop which isn't on all the time, gets taken to work/away with you on business etc. etc. In that case you're either looking at buying a mini to act as a server or syncing your content to the ATV (or both).
Click to expand...

Right on. I tried streaming with one of my G3 B&W units and it stuttered pretty bad. Now I've got a 1GHz iMac G4 running OS X server and it works great for streaming. Though, I do not like QTSS very much. I know you can simply use iTunes to stream, and I suppose that is the best way to go. Unless of course you need to view the videos from outside of your LAN. :)
 
Very cool. I think I missed something though. How did you go from having a circuit board sticking out at 90 degrees, to a nice small wooden extension?
 
Using the 44 pin hdd extension cable allows you to lay the sata bridge wherever you want. You can actually close up the atv since the bridge is no thicker than the internal hdd your are removing. Cave added the wooden "footer" so he could use a female eSata socket on the back of the atv instead of just having the eSata cable come right out the back like in my mod.
 
dynaflash said:
Using the 44 pin hdd extension cable allows you to lay the sata bridge wherever you want. You can actually close up the atv since the bridge is no thicker than the internal hdd your are removing. Cave added the wooden "footer" so he could use a female eSata socket on the back of the atv instead of just having the eSata cable come right out the back like in my mod.
Click to expand...

Makes sense. You could probably fit the external drive circuitry and the drive in his "footer" too, and just shoot a jack out to allow it to be plugged into a pc for other uses? You might have heat issues with that I suppose. It is kind of handy to have the drive external. I'm just thinking out loud about making it more tidy.
 
For me, one of the main attractions was the eSata drive being external. I have it hidden out of the way and there is no heat from the drive affecting the atv (which we all know runs plenty hot anyway). Plus, servicing the drive via your mac is about as easy as it gets if thats your thing as all eSata capable external hard drives I have ever seen also have a handy usb port which allows for easy hooking up to your mac if need be.
 
dynaflash said:
For me, one of the main attractions was the eSata drive being external. I have it hidden out of the way and there is no heat from the drive affecting the atv (which we all know runs plenty hot anyway). Plus, servicing the drive via your mac is about as easy as it gets if thats your thing as all eSata capable external hard drives I have ever seen also have a handy usb port which allows for easy hooking up to your mac if need be.
Click to expand...

I think what I'm going to do is actually a combination of what you and Cave Man did. I'm going to have a little tail sticking out of the back of the atv that has a eSATA female jack on it. That way I won't have to build a footer, but I also won't have the long eSATA cable hanging out when I move it.
 
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