> Recently I decided to upgrade its storage capacity, and replaced
> its 500GB hard drive (which was pretty large at the time I bought
> it) with a 4TB drive. I did an install from scratch using a
> network install CD, then copied my /home partition (using rsync)
> from the old drive.
[...]
> (Side question: is this an acceptable way to upgrade a hard drive?)
It's acceptable enough that we'll keep talking to you. 🙂
Personally, assuming the 500GB drive was basically full, I suspect I'd
have just done a `dd` copy of the 500GB drive to the new drive, followed
by a quick `gparted` run to resize on-the-fly the partitions (in order
to get access to the extra 3.5GB).
> Everything works great with one exception:
> when I fire up Portal the sound gets glitches about once a second.
> This only happens with Steam games; I can play MP3s and videos
> with mpv and the sound is perfect, as it is when watching YouTube
> videos. If I swap the old drive back in everything is fine.
I suspect the difference is that the Steam games keep your machine very
busy whereas playing a video isn't nearly as demanding, so the machine
ends up too busy to refill the sound buffer before its empty.
As for why this happens with the new disk&install and not with the old
disk&install, ...
AFAICT it can be either due to the new install such as a difference in
the configuration and/or installed software (e.g. one using pulseaudio
and the other pipewire), or due to the new hardware, presumably because
some operations are slower.
Can you boot with both disks connected? If so, can you try to boot off
of the 500GB and then use the /home from the 4TB drive (and vice versa)?
I think you should be able to do that by booting to "rescue" where
(after entering the root password) you'd do something like
umount /home
mount /dev/the/other/home/partition /home
exit
I'd tend to think that a modern 4TB drive should be no slower than
a 500GB drive, no matter the operation, but maybe the new drive has
a particularly small cache, or maybe it's shingled and the Steam game
makes a fair amount of writes to the disk which ends up affecting the
reads needed to fetch the next chunk of sound?
Stefan
