I have been working on a pet project of mine for some time now and have finally done it. I have grasped the holy grail of the Apple TV… I have given mass storage over a wireless connection to it.

I have had a 160Gb Apple TV since they became available for purchase in June of 2007. I quickly filled it up. Then I began the task of filling up the hard drive on my Macbook Pro, slowing my work and causing applications to crash on a regular basis. I thought that there had to be a better way and started searching Google for the answer. Nothing. Just a lot of people in the same situation as me, too much media and not enough storage.

So I began designing a device solution that would fit the bill for me. I wanted to use iTunes for the management interface because, well, iTunes is the best media management application around. I Also wanted to make use of some kind of a raid system because if I was going to rip my entire DVD collection onto it and purchase movies and songs off of the iTunes Store, then I did not want to ever have to do it again. It costs too much time and money to do that twice. So I settled on the Drobo for now…

I use a Macbook Pro and a Macbook, I did not want either of our computers to be a controller for the raid, so I ended up purchasing a used G4 Mac Mini to control the Drobo. It was fast enough to run Leopard so I have screen sharing available to administer the system, no need for a monitor.

Now I just needed to get all of the pieces working together, seamlessly. This took a lot of trial and error… and a few deleted key files that kept me up until all hours of the night trying desperately to replace.

First I set up the Drobo as a network drive on my Airport Extreme Base Station and made it accessible to all of the computers on the network. With a password of course.

The Drobo is great because it is a disk robot that can take any sized disk and use it as part of its raid. One can mix and match disk types and sizes with out worry, and if one drive fails no data is lost.

I chose to start with two 320Gb 10K RPM SATA drives and build from there. The Drobo will take 4 drives so there is plenty of room for growth. *As of the writing of this article, I have already filled it up and am looking at expanding to 1Tb drives. The next step will be to go to a complete NAS solution like this one by Promise Technologies. However at $12,000 for a half full NAS, the pricing is a bit high for general adoption by the average family. The Drobo ran me $499 plus the cost of hard drives.

Next I moved the iTunes directory onto the Drobo keeping in mind to keep the contents exactly as they were on my Macbook Pro. I then placed symbolic links that point to the files on the Drobo on my Mac Mini, MacBook Pro and Macbook. Remember the Mac Mini is the controller for the system. One important note is to keep a real file, not a symlink of “iTunes Music Library.xml on each of the computers. 

To create a symlink in Linux and Unix it should look like this:

ln -s [target file name] [symbolic link name]

So for my set up it looked like this; ln -s “/Volumes/Drobo/iTunes/Album Artwork” “Album Artwork”. *The quotes are needed when ever there is a space in a directory name. So, Album Artwork would need quotes around both parts of name in the command.

Finally, I initialized iTunes on the Mac Mini and synced it up to the Apple TV. I chose not to have it move everything over to the Apple TV. This does cause a slight lag in the read time between the Drobo and the Apple TV, but it is not enough for me to worry about.

Now everything that I import from my Macbook Pro into iTunes shows up on the Apple TV, the other MacBook and the Mac Mini. I have also purchased a couple of movies from the iTunes Store through the Apple TV, and they also sync up with the other computers. It is not perfect and there are a few small bugs to work out, like one can only have one copy of iTunes accessing the database and files at a time, but it works well for me.

Please add to this and modify it. I believe that if the community works hard, we can get a mass storage solution that is robust and worthy of our media. Please send me a note or a link if you do make improvements and I will post them here.

*I am not responsible for you loosing your iTunes Library. If you don’t know what you are doing, then take extra care. And always, ALWAYS back up your junk!