40gb vs 160gb apple tv?

Welcome to the  Discussion Forums.

Personally I prefer to sync my photos and stream more or less everything else. If you have a good network and are not likely to be removing your mac/pc regularly, this is likely the best way to use the tv and in this scenario a 40 GB would likely be enough.

If however your network is not the best or you want to remove your mac/pc from time to time, you will find you need to sync more content to the tv in which case you would want to look at the 160 GB model.

i agree with winston. i recently went for an apple tv after much thinking about it, and decided on the 40GB model. at the end of the day i thought my huge itunes music and movie collection and iphoto collection between them was around 160GB anyway, so whichever i went for it wouldn't hold everything. anything that isn't synced to the apple tv gets streamed from your mac anyway, and if you're like me i leave my mac on during the day and turn it off when i go to bed. therefore there was no problem with not being able to access content. the only time you will have problems if you tend to leave your mac turned off except when you're sat at it, as obviously if you settle down in your lounge to listen to some music on your apple tv and your mac isn't switched on, you might find you're trying to listen to music that needs to be streamed and thus you won't be able to hear it.

winston might be able to confirm this, but the other thing i did was set the power settings on my mac to not go to sleep as i think if your mac goes to sleep and your apple tv needs to stream some content from it, it won't be able to.

if you're primarily photos and podcasts i would imagine the 40GB would be fine ... save yourself some money!

enjoy!

all my computers are off when i'm not using them so i
sync all my music and a few videos and pictures
and stream the rest of the stuff i dont need so
often

if a hd is filled more then 75% it start to have issues
and i'm too close to 40GB of media so i got the 160GB version

Rudegar wrote:
if a hd is filled more then 75% it start to have issues

where did you get that fact from ?
i can tell you that i regularly had 2 320GB HDDs at almost 95% full and had no issues at all with them.

thats an old thumb rule
as the more data is put on a disk
the worse the seektimes become

if you set the apple tv to automatic sync it will fill the apple tv's hard drive almost right up, so i assume it's designed to happily work at full capacity (it does leave a bit of space to work with so that you can download content etc. before the apple tv will delete synced stuff)

Personally I don't think 75% is such a bad target for the 40 GB tv, although I'd generally work to about 90% in most other cases.

The comparable size of the tv HDD and the average size of a video file mean that the unused capacity of tv can rapidly change by adding only one or two files. If you 90% fill a 40 GB tv (29 GB), even the addition of a modest feature length HD rental will place you in an inadvisable position.