ARK Writing to Disk Super Slow?

[SkyHawk105]

My game downloads updates really fast as it does with other games but for ARK is seems it just sits on 100% for a long time to write the stuff to my hard drive. No other game does this. Anyone know a fix? I am on Windows 10.

[Superkuh]

I am having the same problem. The disk I use for steam is not my OS disk and my tests with HD Tune show it can easily hit 130 MB/s. But when I install ARK updates it never, ever goes above 20 MB/s. Other games do, just not ARK. This makes even installing a 600 MB update take 10 to 15 minutes. It's absurd.

[Superkuh]

A month later and the problem still persists.

When ARK is updating steam's disk write-rate is limited to < 25 MB/s and it's usually more like 10 MB/s. It is intermittent and bursty even after the internet download has finished. The steam directory HDD's "queue length" is 5 (out of 5) at least 2/3 of the time. What this means in practice is that even a 600 MB update takes 15 minutes to install despite downloading in a minute or so.

So... the download speed is fine. Other game's steam update write speeds are constant and fast. Using HDDTune I see that the dedicated steam HDD has max write of ~150 MB/s. S.M.A.R.T. results return no significant errors or problems with the drive.

Watching the disk activity for the updater I see that everything is happening in E:\SteamApps\downloading\...\ShooterGame\. It's going through every single tiny .umap and related file reading it and then maybe doing a write. Most of these reads are done at rates well under 500 KB/s. Only the occasional large file will begin to write at at faster speed of ~5 MB/s. All together these operations never get above ~25 MB/s total.

Could it be that my HDD is saturating in terms of IO operations per second? If so, why can I run HDDTune co-currently when steam is updating ARK and still get 90-130 MB/s on the dedicated steam HDD? There's obviously lots of available bandwidth. CPU usage during all of this never gets above ~15%.

[SkyHawk105]

All my steam updates are quick and I barely notice them, then ark updates and just sits there blocking all other updates while it writes crap to disk for 30 minutes.

[Buffalo]

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[40mike40]

Originally posted by SkyHawk105:

My game downloads updates really fast as it does with other games but for ARK is seems it just sits on 100% for a long time to write the stuff to my hard drive. No other game does this. Anyone know a fix? I am on Windows 10.

Yep, confirmed. The specs on the Steam Page are horribly out of date.

[Timotheeee1]

Originally posted by SkyHawk105:

My game downloads updates really fast as it does with other games but for ARK is seems it just sits on 100% for a long time to write the stuff to my hard drive. No other game does this. Anyone know a fix? I am on Windows 10.

steam has to decompress everything, patch the stuff that's been changed, then recompress everything. that's why it takes ages, and payday 2 has the same problem