Re-downloading games is faster than patching.

[A.D]

I noticed recently that reinstalling some games is faster then waiting hours for them to patch.

[MadZec]

Maybe sometimes because patches not only replace loads of game data, they also have to delete main data and then unpack them and set them properly.
Just personal guess I do not know for sure....

[Tequila Sunset]

I am experiencing this as well, On an M.2 NVME SSD and its way quicker for most patches to just redownload instead

[ReBoot]

This usually happens when background crapware bogs disk IO down. Let's check for that, start your system in safe mode (for obvious reasons with networking) and see if patching goes faster then.

[Lithurge]

For SSD's check write caching and disble/enable it depending on what it's already set to. Some people have found this fixes the speed issue.

[Emma]

This thread was quite old before the recent post, so we're locking it to prevent confusion.