Extremely Slow Patch Times On Steam Deck

[AkimboBeta]

Heyo,

I really like my Steam Deck 512 GB LCD, and have used it pretty heavily for the past 3 years. I've taken it apart, put it back together, overclocked it, upgraded it, taken it on vacations and everything else under the sun. It's great... Except for one very, very annoying thing - Game patch times.

I'm currently writing this as I'm waiting for Helldivers 2 to patch. It's just a 5 GB update, yet I've been waiting several hours for it to finish. I have friends waiting on me, but I'm sitting here unable to play the game with them, because the Deck is patching the game at a miserable 50 mbps - or so it says. Sometimes it says it hits 2.9 gbps, other times it slows down to 30. The weird thing is, is it should already be done by now, yet it's estimating it's going to take another 1 - 2 hours! It is unbelievably frustrating.

In the 5-ish minutes it took me to type the two first paragraphs, the progress has moved by 1%. One entire percent. I just want to be able to play games with my friends! I don't know why it takes so long, but I do know that the CPU is sitting at a casual 100% utilization, while only using about 5W. This sucks, man; I bought this thing to play games with, not to watch very slow graphs for hours on-end.

I'm sorry if this comes off as rude at all, I'm just extremely annoyed at having to deal with this for so long. It's made my other friends not want to get Steam Decks, because I'm always the guy they're waiting on, and it sucks. I'd really like to see something be done, if possible, to fix the patch times; the game was finished downloading over 2 hours ago now, it's just struggling to patch. And I'm struggling to be happy with my Deck right about now.

[Mahjik]

Do you have it installed on your SDD or SD card? I have HD2 on my internal SSD and today's patch didn't take that long to update.

[AkimboBeta]

This is installed on my external NVMe, but I have had similar performance issues on the SD card. It seems like the Deck struggles to patch games on any external drive.

To make sure it wasn't just the drive, I had ran a disk benchmark. The drive seems to be limited by the USB 3.0 speeds of the official dock, but the numbers were 400 MB/s sq read, 396 MB/s sq write, 165 MB/s random read and 127 MB/s random write. Yet, when I just checked now, the patch speeds were down to a 5 Mbps (not MB, Mb) crawl. They did temporarily jump up to 243 mbps for a few seconds, before slowing back down to about 70 mbps.

[Mahjik]

Does your external NVMe have cooling? Those like most storage devices will slow down if they heat up too much. If no cooling, you can try putting a little fan on it and see if the speeds stay steady. If they do, you know it's a heat throttling issue.

[AkimboBeta]

It is in an enclosure with a heatsink and fins. I had paused the patch to run the benchmark, so it was as hot as it would have gotten while patching. Though, the enclosure did not feel warm to the touch, like it tends to do after pushing the drive hard for extended periods of time.

[Mahjik]

If you can open the enclosure, try having a fan blow it (or if you can, leave the cover off for open air).

Sometimes to find out what is wrong, you need to eliminate what is not the problem. I would start by eliminating heat on the NVMe as the problem.

[AkimboBeta]

Again, the drive isn't overheating, I've already eliminated that as a factor. The issue is the Steam Deck's CPU going to 100% while only managing 5 mbps write speeds on external drives at times. It will do that on both my external SSD and my SD card, but not on the internal drive. My SD card is good for 240 mbps minimum and my SSD can do over 1000 mbps random write, but the Deck is struggling to even hit 100 mbps sustained.