AppleTV external USB media storage

A working patch was released today that will allow you to use an external USB device as the primary storage for your audio and video media.

Just a recap for those who are not familiar with this. A few months back, AppleTVHacks.net and FatWallet set up a bounty looking for a way to use an external USB drive as a primary storage for the Apple TV. The patch must still allow the Apple TV to boot from its internal hard drive but only use the external USB drive as its primary storage.

First of all, our team would like to thank Patrick Walton of University of Chicago for sending us the original entry. We certainly appreciate his effort; it was a quite an achievement. Unfortunately, syncing did not work. By the time we realized the problem, Patrick was already too busy to fix his code.

Fortunately, Tom Anthony, our resident geek, was able to pick up where Patrick left off and fixed the syncing problem that the original patch had.

This is known to work with version 1.0 for sure, but some folks are claiming it doesn’t work with 1.1. So, for now, there’s still room for some additional hacking on this one.

Get busy filling up your device with your terabyte-size video collection. Just make sure to back up your system before applying this patch.

References:
USB Patch Download and Instructions – Link
HOW TO – Back Up and Restore the AppleTV Hard Disk – Link
Enable SSH Access to Your AppleTV – Link