Why do updates take that long?

[Rennfan]

After every update the steam updater moves lots of files which take several minutes, even though the download itself isn't that big. Is this normal?

[Wolfgang]

Probably you HDD being super slow.

[mojo_musica]

The files downloaded might be relatively small, but they have to be written into the very large install size of the game, and then verified. Nothing to do with SCS, it is the way Steam delivers updates and patches for the game.
Old spinning rust hard drives are now too slow for the size of game installs, move to an on-board NVMe M2 solid state drive and the time taken will drop dramatically, as well as zero lag when loading scenery in-game and saving.
SATA SSD's are also better, but not as good as NVMe, external USB SSD's are not worth it.

[Rennfan]

Originally posted by Wolfgang:

Probably you HDD being super slow.

I got a SSD.

[The Pitts]

Exclusively SSD or a mix of SSD and HD. Perhaps Steam is using a HD because that has the most free space for temporary files?

[Wolfgang]

Originally posted by Rennfan:

Originally posted by Wolfgang:

Probably you HDD being super slow.

I got a SSD.

You sure that the game is on the SSD and that it isn't pretty full? Because my M.2 NVMe SSD does the whole update within a minute.

[Rennfan]

It's an 1 TB Samsung SATA-SSD (entirely SSD, no hard drive). Has about one third of free space.

[spuranz]

Originally posted by Rennfan_musicar:

Rennfan ]
It's an 1 TB Samsung SATA-SSD (entirely SSD, no hard drive). Has about one third of free space.

Originally posted by mojo_musicar:

SATA SSD's are also better, but not as good as NVMe, external USB SSD's are not worth it.

mojo_musicar have gave you the answer.

Here's a quote from Kingston website (https://www.kingston.com/en/blog/pc-performance/nvme-vs-sata):

"NVMe is a storage protocol designed specifically with SSDs in mind. With the elimination of the intermediating SATA HBA layer, NVMe allows SSDs to communicate directly with the CPU via the PCIe bus, opening channels for ground-breaking performance improvements. To put it into perspective, the performance limit of the SATA III bus is 6Gb/s, meaning a SATA SSD can offer a max of 550MB/s of throughput after overhead.
Whereas, a single PCIe 3.0 lane can offer 1GB/s (bidirectional) of throughput, so a PCIe 3x4 SSD can reach a throughput of up to 4GB/s read/write. That goes up to 8GB/s (bidirectional) for PCIe Gen 4X4 SSDs."

[The Pitts]

Nonetheless, several minutes to update feels high even with a SATA SSD.

[spuranz]

Then what could it be......hmmm....Is one of those modern world problems is it not?

[Wolfgang]

It can be an issue with the antivirus program slowing it down to a crawl.