Aspire TC 391 UR11 Storage Expansion

Caroll

Is there anybody who can help me further with this expansion issue on this Aspire model? Given that it has very limited storage, I wanted to add another SSD/HDD in it.

There's an available slot for it but no way to power it up.  I have reached out to Technical support and they have only suggested that I purchase

a cable separately. I was provided with the parts number: 5.0VQXD1.007 but it's almost like trying to find a unicorn. I have been scouring the internet and making phone calls
but I still don't have a positive lead. Has anybody tried to do the same thing? Any other parts number you were provided with?

Also for those who have purchased the same item, have you upgraded the existing SSD and/or RAM?

ttttt

@Caroll

As far as I know the TC391-UR11 has 500 GB NVMe SSD, maybe you think that is still limited storage.

It will be helpful if you can remove the hard drive plate (the big piece of silver metal plate) by removing the two screws close to the front panel and lift up the three plastic tabs and take some photos and attach them here.  One is close up of the still available SATA ports on the motherboard. The others are in the area about half foot from the power supply toward the front panel area, concentrating on the wires from the power supply.

If you are using the 500 GB NVMe SSD as the bootdrive, there should be at least a couple of still open SATA ports on motherboard.
You mentionded " no way to power it up", is it because you could not find any power connectors from the power supply?

If you trace the wires out of the power supply, you may find another set of wires leading to the area close to the front panel.
Due to the good cable management of this PC, these extra unused wires/cables are normally somewhat hidden from view, and people may not aware of the existence of the wires. You may want to pull out this set of wires carefully. Do not pull by force, as some wires or connectors there may be tangled up with a front panel power switch blue-white wire. Again, BE CAREFU there, to avoid breaking the other wire.

Once this set of wires are out, you can use one of the SATA power connectors plugging to the new SSD with the capacity that you want, together with a data cable from the motherboard to this new SSD. The new SSD can be mounted to the back of the HDD/SSD plate that you removed earlier.

I won't worry about the cable part numbers as the SATA data cables are usually easy to get at about USD $4-$8 each from Newegg, Amazon, Ebay...etc. I suggest an 8" length data cable, if this additional SATA data cable didn't come with your PC when new.

The other way to add storage is to get an USB external HDD. I recommend getting a 5 TB WD MyPassport ( if you really want plenty of storage space and don't worry about transfer speed) for around USD $120.

To get more RAM, I always suggest people adding another RAM stick identical to the stock RAM to enable dual channel performance. To get info of the stock RAM, download and run the CPU-Z program, look at the SPD tab there. Get a new RAM stick conform to the spec of the original RAM stick. Or you can pull out the original RAM and get the model number and spec from the sticker on it.

billsey

The Aspire TC-391 models support a single M.2 SSD and one or two SATA drives. Near the SATA connectors on the MB is a single row six pin white connector that provides power for the two SATA drives. They usually include the cable for that in the box with the computer, but in some SKUs they don't. Often instead they put a slightly different cable in the unit to drive just an ODD. If you need the version that drives both an ODD and a HDD/SSD the Acer part number is: 50.VQXD1.007.