Steam updates are destroying my hard drives??

[Hijal]

I am having to use my phone to write on here so forgive any grammatical or spelling errors I make -- I will correct them in edits for clarification.

About a month ago right after a update was pushed by steam I started having serious problems with steam coming to a crawl if not completly locking up (these freeze ups would also effect my entire system and cause it to become almost completely unresponsive too). It took me days to finally narrow down the source of those issues to steam itself (computer ran just fine so long I did not open steam, then the problems would begin). Apprantly my hard drive that I used to store my steam games ended up having errors on it so I did what anyone should do in that situation and restarted my computer and performed a disk check & repair in the BIOS. The problems did not go awy however so I was forced to uninstall steam and reformat the drive I used to store my steam games.... this resulted in that hard drive no longer being accessible and windows will no longer acknowledge its presence.

Now before anyone says what I know is going to be asked... no -- it was not old and it was not failing I barely had the hard drive for 3 months at the time. No odd clicks, buzzes, whirrings or unusual sounds of any kind. It operated at normal routine temperatures and not once got filled above 50% capacity even -- pretty much brand new.

It sucked but J just took it as a sh!t happens moment at the time so I justordered a replacement. But.. why am I telling you this if I just replaced my drive? Well the reason is because as of right now (patch day) I have gone through the exact same set of problems I had before the last time stream had pushed out a patch before the problems had appeared. I have gone through the exact same steps of troubleshootjng I had underwent before to find and solve my problem (cleared steams download and browser cache, tried differant download servers, tried to repair steam library, you name it I have done it). I am currently now at the stage where all other options have failed for me and I have uninstalled steam and am currently in the process of reformatting my brand new hard drive... if this trend holds I may wake in the morning to find myself in possession of another bricked and even newer hard drive.

As it stands I have burned about 100 USD on hard drives in the last 3 months and so far its looking like steam has somehow been the most likely catalyst if not cause behind all of this (I've never heard of a patch or software outside of malware being able to do this to hard drives though but at this point the bread crumbs unfortunatly all seem to be leading to steams updates)? Any assistance in helping me resolve this problem and even better yet finding some way to get my hard drive (possibly drives) to work again would be greatly appreciated...

I have been at this pretty much most the day and am rather exhausted by all of this so I am going to bed now though. I will check back in the morning and publish the results of my reformat then. Hopefully I will luck out but I have a pretty good feeling I am going to awake to a new drive I can no longer access anymore.

[Zekiran]

Steam does not cause this.

Hardware failure does.

If you've replaced several hard drives: your motherboard, your power supply?

Particularly power supply. It's not strong enough, and if you believe it is, it's *broken*.

Again though: software does not cause this. Hardware failure DOES.

[🍋 Lemonfed 🍋]

I've seen HDD that where not even a year old with very little hours of power on starting to have bad sectors on them , inside computers that where not even used for gaming.

if steam had a glitch that could cause HDD to fail there would be thousands of peoples complaining about it.

[rawWwRrr]

Originally posted by Hijal:

(I've never heard of a patch or software outside of malware being able to do this to hard drives though but at this point the bread crumbs unfortunatly all seem to be leading to steams updates)?

Uhm.... no.

I can show you a few dozen hard drives that have been subjected to "steams updates" and all are still functioning, some onto second and third computers. I've got nearly 5 TB of games installed at present, many updates than you're encountering most likely, and the hard drives aren't even struggling. You have something else at play.

[Dr.Shadowds 🐉]

If a specific software was causing damage to HDD, you wouldn't be the only person making the complain. I haven't heard Steam causing damage to HDD, so I have to wonder how you came to the conclusion that it's Steam.

I suggest test your hardware for bad sectors, such I assume you did not from your post, and ensure softwares, and files are not corrupted being on that drive.

Please list the model of that HDD, it be good to more about it. Also what your CPU, GPU, and RAM?

Do you use any 3rd party software that manage your files, permissions, and/or data protocol? Do you use any compression, or 3rd party compression software? Do you run a lot of things in the background?

Just because something new, doesn't mean you couldn't have gotten a defective device. Also as Zekiran brought up a good point, but very unlikely, but I won't roll it out, if you're cutting it close, or lacking the recommended watts needed, you could encounter issues, another issue I could point is possible loose cable either SATA cable, or power cable from pay to HDD, or defect for one of the cables, as these are also possiblity.

[Muppet among Puppets]

What uses your hdd in taskmanager?

If it only happens with steam, to look for software you should check your security software. But to wear out a drive by reading it would take years in average.

Maybe steam just makes a problem obvious. Try the hdd in another computer with steam on it.

[AmsterdamHeavy]

It isnt Steam. I have kept a computer powered on, with Steam running, for the vast majority (at least 95% of the last almost 16 years, Ive never had a hard drive fail.

[Hijal]

Just got up and checked on things and the format has failed... hard drive is now RAW.

As for the PSU I actually just upgraded that not that last spring and got a 2nd GPU. This is what I'm running:

1x Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD3 Motherboard
4x 8GB G.Skill Ripjaws X Series DDR3 RAM (32GB total)
1x Rosewill 1000W Modular PSU (80 Plus Bronze Certified, +12V Rail, Crossfire ready)
1x AMD 8350
2x AMD Radeon R9 280's (Crossfire capable)
1x Samsung SSD 850 EVO, 120GW (Master)
1x WDC Blue, 1TB (The one that has gone RAW, same as the last)
1x WDC Black, 512GB

As far as I can tell unless I overlooked something somehow I should have plenty of power.

At this point I don't know if it was steam though -- I was pretty clear about that however at this point all the symptoms are pointing to steams updates right now as the trigger for the cause of my hard drives having these problems.

This hasn't been a singular occurrence but has been reproduced twice now in my case though. I really just need some answers and help getting to the bottom of this at this point though.

I don't know if a lot of the assessments that some have made are correct though and here are my thoughts are reasons as to why I think this goes beyond the initial suggestions that have been made:

1. If this has been caused by motherboard or hard drive failure why has this only affected a single hard drive (that's sole purpose is to act as a steam library)?

2. If this has been caused by some hardware fault beyond the hard drive itself why hasn't this problem popped up in other ways (via motherboard or PSU problems, or GPU issues due to insufficient power)?

3. Why haven't the other hard drives been having problems as well?

Those three questions that are raised give me reason to not believe that this is a matter of a problem with the motherboard and the power supply. There have not been any symptoms of a power supply problem -- no intermittent shutdowns, power loss, or crashes have been taking place. There is no evidence of corruption of any kind on any of the other hard drives and the system is pretty healthy and responsive and fast with the exception of the bad hard drives and any attempt at running anything steam related prior to efforts being made to correct these issues.

4. Why wouldn't these problems have manifested before & why only after a steam update has been pushed out?

In response to a number of Dr.Shadowds' questions:

I don't use any 3rd party software in that capacity. The most that I ever run in the background is CCleaner or Malwarebytes (And yes... I did take that into consideration when I had all my problems too. I disabled them along with windows defender/AV when I made attempts at getting steam to work again -- never had problems like this from them before in the past either, let alone from Steam).

Im response to Muppet among Pupppets' question:

At the time of the problems occurring and my trying to fix them I never used more than 30% of my HDD in task manager -- and this is while system wide freeze ups were occurring while making attempts to get steam working again (while steam was running). It may also be important to note I was using less then 15-20% CPU and memory at these moments of time too. Freeze ups would immediately disappear whenever I shut down steam and all steam related background processes. I believe the reason and cause for this is because steam was trying to access the library files but were unable to due to the hard drive being corrupted after steam was updated.

[Muppet among Puppets]

In cases where the hdd becomes RAW, it "usually" has the following reasons:
Gets unplugged or disconnected,
virus,
partition table,
damaged file system,
bad blocks,
bad security settings.

That are reasons i found.


About what steam updates we talk?

[Magma Dragoon]

Are you buying hard drives from third party Amazon sellers?

[wuddih]

Steam just tends to make existing problems more visible.

an update/download via Steam is more taxing on your hdd then f.e. your normal download via your web browser .. so issues with it are more present while Steam is doing something than something else.

[Hijal]

Originally posted by Muppet among Puppets:

In cases where the hdd becomes RAW, it "usually" has the following reasons:
Gets unplugged or disconnected,
virus,
partition table,
damaged file system,
bad blocks,
bad security settings.

That are reasons i found.


About what steam updates we talk?

This did not happen until steam had been updated... the only thing that is on the hard drive was my steam library.

I did scan my system for virus' of course though that would be the first knee jerk response in a situation like this. Nothing was found -- nor has any other symptoms of a virus or evidence of the system being compromised or any other hardware being affected by a virus has been apparant on my system. This ties directly into a lot of my questions about whether or not this is a problem with a bad power supply or a faulty mobo -- all the symptoms and the sequence of events suggest something else is the root cause of this.

There is no doubt something wrong the the hard drives but I need to find out how and what exactly is causing it and right now all the evidence is suggesting that in some way or capacity something has caused my now two separate hard drives to become damaged (best guess is something went wrong in read/write somehow?) and it could of only been triggered by steam itself because the only files kept on these drives has been the steam library.

Right now the only two most likely reasons that make any sense for this problem is either steams updates somehow did something... how I do not know I'm not a programmer I don't know all the intricacies about how a program can interact with something on the hardware level I just know there's a read/write process and the only things that really initiate that process in my case is steam attempting to access my library whenever I want to play games or if I tried to interact with the files on that drive through some other means (explorer, AV, etc.)

The only other likely scenario is that I had been sold two hard hard drives of the same make/model that were just simply prone to failure and steam somehow enticed both of these drives to go kaput in the exact same fashion and the cause is just plain and simply faulty hard drives. This is quite possible because I have not been having issues with steam on all of my other existing hard drives and this has only happened on these particular drives.

[Muppet among Puppets]

Originally posted by Hijal:

this has only happened on these particular drives.

And that computer.

[Hijal]

Originally posted by wuddih:

Steam just tends to make existing problems more visible.

an update/download via Steam is more taxing on your hdd then f.e. your normal download via your web browser .. so issues with it are more present while Steam is doing something than something else.

I am inclined to think this is the case as well. Could be that steam did trigger the problem but the actual fault could of been in the particular drives I was using. It's a fairly commonly used drive though I find it very hard to believe that I'm the only person using these particular drives who has been having this problem though. I just got the short straw I guess?

Originally posted by Magma Dragoon:

Are you buying hard drives from third party Amazon sellers?

I did buy them both via Amazon but they were both new and directly from amazon not any third parties.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0088PUEPK/ref=ppx_od_dt_b_asin_title_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

[Satoru]

Note that steam writes to disk. That's all it does

It cannot 'destroy' drives. It does exactly what it is designed to do. What all programs do. It writes to disk. Steam does nothing special other than making standard write and read requests to the OS. That's it.

By this logic, I should complain to Microsoft and Oracle about how their database software 'destroys my disks'. You could install any kind of high write cycle software and it would 'destroy' your system.

your issues are likely hardware related. Most likely due to a motherboard failure, cable failure or an imminent drive failure. You should refer to your event viewer or get SMART diagnostics on the drive.

[Muppet among Puppets]

Anything in the hdd smart data?

I once had an old drive of those. I read they are different now.