Have SF314-511 laptop and I'm trying to put in a bigger m.2 SSD.

Craig5harpe1

Hi,

I have the SF314-511 laptop and I'm trying to put in a bigger m.2 SSD. When I do this it's not detectable on the laptop to do any install. It's showing in the bios. Any help would be great.

[Edited the thread to add model number to the title and add issue detail]

Puraw

https://community.acer.com/en/discussion/709916/have-sf314-511-laptop-and-im-trying-to-put-in-a-bigger-m-2-ssd

There is only one PCIe 3x4 interface for a Gen3 SSD and the Samsung 970 Evo Plus 1TB has been tested, Acer recommends up to 512GB SSDs

If you clone or restore a backup (recommended) from your old SSD there is no need to initialize the new SSD. What size SSD are you installing and did you check if the Sata mode is set for AHCI in BIOS? Some SSDs require a special driver, some SSDs require initialization:
Initialize new disks | Microsoft Learn

billsey

The step you are likely missing is to clone your old drive to the new one. Since your laptop only has one M.2 slot for SSDs the cloning process will need an external case for the drive. They are really pretty cheap and can be reused so go ahead and get one. Put the new drive in the case, boot from the old drive, use the cloning software (there are a bunch of free ones) to clone the internal drive to the external, the shut down, remove the old drive, install the new one and button everything back up. You should boot into the same environment as you had before, except with a much larger C: partition. Once you are comfortable everything is working fine, put the old drive into the external case and connect it, then use Disk Management to remove all it's partitions and create a single large data partition instead. That gives you and empty external drive for something like backups.