(Solved) Extremely low disk usage

[Pim]

My Samsung 840 EVO SSD is acting weird when downloading games from Steam. The disk usage usually hangs around 1-4mb/s which is slow but okay, I guess. However, sometimes it gets into this ''stage'' where disk usage slowly declines to about a few bytes per second, and then slowly crawls back up. When disk usage is so low it also limits the download speed.

- I've checked my settings in Steam
- I've checked task manager to see if any other program is using the disk, that's not the case

Any ideas on what to check?

[Huntsman Yang Lung]

Hey, for some reason (I'm pretty sure it's steam and not my PC) they have it set up to where when download ing on C: the disk limits the amount of Network that can be used, if you look you'll notice that if your disk where running better it would be downloading 20-70%faster, I look at task manager and notice that my disk is only running at about 11 to 18% however my download (disk) is running at bytes and refuses to speed up, and stay with the speed of the network which would significantly improve how much data my computer receives, somebody please help me with this, as I don't know alot....

[Muppet among Puppets]

Your drive can write around 120mB s or so.

[reillym32]

Origineel geplaatst door Muppet among Puppets:

Your drive can write around 120mB s or so.

Why does this guy keep making comments on this post, you clearly know nothing of how computers actually work so nothing of what your saying is actually helping.

[The Giving One]

Origineel geplaatst door reillym32:

Why does this guy keep making comments on this post, you clearly know nothing of how computers actually work so nothing of what your saying is actually helping.

And the post that you just made here is helping in what way ?

What was he saying that is wrong ?

[reillym32]

Origineel geplaatst door Muppet among Puppets:

Origineel geplaatst door PimN:

When disk usage is so low it also limits the download speed.

Has there ever been a time in human history where disk write speed determined download speed?

Posts like this. He clearly doesn't understand that while something is downloading, it has to write itself to the disk, therefore if its writing at a low percentage to your disk, your download speed will be greatly reduced, no matter what. This comment, quoted above, is the exact reason why he shouldn't be commenting because disk write speed always affects your download speed, so yes at every point in human history, at least in the history of computers, disk write speed affects download speeds.

[The Giving One]

@ reillym32

Ok, so let's just assume you are correct, for the sole purpose of discussion here. Why did you post here just to correct someone about this ?

Do you have the same problem as the OP of the thread, or a similar problem ? Seems to me that focusing on the actual problem, instead of worrying about if a person should be posting here or not, would be better served. Don't you think ?

If you feel someone is posting the wrong information, then debate them in a friendly discussion. No need to attack them and say they should not be posting here at all. That user is actually one of the most helpful users in the community, as easily seen by their post history.

Your account has literally 2 posts as of now. So if you have a similar problem with downloads or disk write speeds, do you want help with that ?

[Muppet among Puppets]

Origineel geplaatst door reillym32:

Origineel geplaatst door Muppet among Puppets:

Has there ever been a time in human history where disk write speed determined download speed?

Posts like this. He clearly doesn't understand that while something is downloading, it has to write itself to the disk, therefore if its writing at a low percentage to your disk, your download speed will be greatly reduced, no matter what.

If a normal drive can write with >120mB/s,
you could download with nearly a gigabit/s.

When was the time where downloads were limited by drive speed before? Tell us.
It is not that drive speed had to keep up with download speeds. Or do you live in a region that had gigabit lines, but there was no use for that because drives were too slow?


Btw, this topic is additionally about a ssd. So its even more than 120mB/s.

This seems to have solved the topic.

Origineel geplaatst door Pim:

Origineel geplaatst door Muppet among Puppets:

You would not play games if a drive throttles to 2mb

Touché.

[Lionheart]

yo i dont think i have download problems but i have reading problems while gaming. The SSD that has games on it throttles down to 5mb/s.

Crystal disk says the SSD is fine ~550mbs read and write.

Moving the game to another disk solves the issue, but is not an ideal solution as the other disks are FULL.

Help.

[Naughty Nitrax]

Origineel geplaatst door Arcade Seven:

weirdly it only happend with one game from steam (payday 2, of all things), so im not gonna bother making changes unless it happens outside of the occasional steam download

It's 2020 now and I'm having the same issue with the same game...
I guess it's just the game tho, since I just tested another two and I have no problem at all with them, but with payday 2, not only the disk speed goes down, but the network speed goes to 0 for like 30 seconds after every 5 seconds of download (I guess it's trying to let the disk catch up), really weird glitch.

[mateezek]

Well i have this problem on The Crew 2 now

[Edwrd_T_Justice]

It's actually hilarious to see the comment about disk speed impacting download speed. The comment completely displayed their ignorance of iops and disk queues, and why you don't take advice from children (age unrelated, you're giving advice on things you show now knowledge on other than reading a faq) on a game forum. His later comment throws out base values that are not true to implementation.

First, steam does something dumb with downloads that blizzard does not. I think it has to do with the drive pre-allocation but I haven't pinned it down.

If your download rate is 1gbps, and your disk writes at 30MBps, your drive is writing 4x slower than the input. This results in the disk queuing up writes and the download throttling until its complete. All of this can be witnessed in resource manager on windows. Steam will always pin my firecuda at 100% active time with a 3-5 queue when downloading. My box has 32 GB of memory and that has no bearing on this, speaking to the memory comment from someone else.

Don't listen to Muppet

[paq]

[SOLVED]
In my case it was all because of the "Allow files on this drive to have contents indexed in addition to file properties" I've disabled some time ago.
Some articles recommend turning it off to speed things up but apparently it makes Steam game download speed HORRIBLE!
https://www.online-tech-tips.com/computer-tips/simple-ways-to-increase-your-computers-performace-turn-off-indexing-on-your-local-drives/

I've even changed my HDD because I thought the previous one is broken. With the "Allow files on this drive to have contents indexed in addition to file properties" turned off I've got 100% HDD usage with write speed around 1 MB/s!!!!
When I've enabled it (default Windows setting) I finally get full HDD speed - around 80 MB/s!

OMG! Finally!

[Muppet among Puppets]

It most certainly was not the real reason for that.
Even if it fixed it for you.

[step grandpa 2]

Origineel geplaatst door paq:

[SOLVED]
In my case it was all because of the "Allow files on this drive to have contents indexed in addition to file properties" I've disabled some time ago.
Some articles recommend turning it off to speed things up but apparently it makes Steam game download speed HORRIBLE!
https://www.online-tech-tips.com/computer-tips/simple-ways-to-increase-your-computers-performace-turn-off-indexing-on-your-local-drives/

I've even changed my HDD because I thought the previous one is broken. With the "Allow files on this drive to have contents indexed in addition to file properties" turned off I've got 100% HDD usage with write speed around 1 MB/s!!!!
When I've enabled it (default Windows setting) I finally get full HDD speed - around 80 MB/s!

OMG! Finally!

Where can i disable it?

[Muppet among Puppets]

Origineel geplaatst door step grandpa:

Origineel geplaatst door paq:

[SOLVED]
In my case it was all because of the "Allow files on this drive to have contents indexed in addition to file properties" I've disabled some time ago.
Some articles recommend turning it off to speed things up but apparently it makes Steam game download speed HORRIBLE!
https://www.online-tech-tips.com/computer-tips/simple-ways-to-increase-your-computers-performace-turn-off-indexing-on-your-local-drives/

I've even changed my HDD because I thought the previous one is broken. With the "Allow files on this drive to have contents indexed in addition to file properties" turned off I've got 100% HDD usage with write speed around 1 MB/s!!!!
When I've enabled it (default Windows setting) I finally get full HDD speed - around 80 MB/s!

OMG! Finally!

Where can i disable it?

He said, enabling it fixed it for him. For any reason.

Anyway, its a checkmark in right click drive menu