Downloads fast on one drive, slow on another

[Teregulus]

Hi everyone. I've been having an issue since I got my new laptop with download speeds on steam. We have a 400mbps download speed, and my laptop has two drives. One is an SSD and the other is an SSHD.

When I download to the SSD, it downloads at roughly 29MB/S and it doesn't dip. When I download to the SSHD though, it fluctuates like crazy. It starts at 30MB/S or something, but then drops to 0kbps, then picks up to around 4-9MB/S for a few minutes, then jumps back up to 30MB/S for a few seconds, then back down again.

This is especially strange since I didn't think that your drive could affect your download speed. Maybe the write speed is bottlenecking it (sorry if this sounds stupid, I don't know very much at all about hardware.) but then I realized that downloading things from GOG, ORIGIN, and UPLAY to my SSHD get normal speeds at around 30MB/S. It's just steam downloading to the SSHD having that issue.

Sorry it's a a lot to read here, but would anyone have an idea what's causing this?

Few things to note-
-I have tried two wifi connections.
-I have tried plugging my laptop into the router directly.
-I have tried switching download region
-I have tried turning off firewalls

Thanks for any help you guys can give here, this is a pretty interesting problem.

[Eldin]

Steam is downloading compressed files.
It decompress files while downloading.
That might be the reason why your download slows down (your SSHD can't decompress and download files fast enough)

[Teregulus]

Originally posted by Eldin:

Steam is downloading compressed files.
It decompress files while downloading.
That might be the reason why your download slows down (your SSHD can't decompress and download files fast enough)

So do you think that I should replace the SSHD with one with a faster speed?
Still, it's odd that this only happens when downloading from steam while other game stores are fine. Do those ones not compress the files?