Having trouble downloading/updateing games

[Dan Jackiel's]

It started today with Squad and Rust. The new update came out for both games and while downloading the update I noticed on squad it stopped at 1.1/1.8 GB. It says its updating. Network usage is 0% and Disk Usage is 100% (10-15 MB/s).

Tho it's technically updating because I can see the blue line next to the game icon in the downloads menu slowly filling but it's extremely slow. After 15 minutes it's only at 1/10 of the hole bar and it's only a 1.8 GB Update I don't know what's going on.

I have SQUAD installed on an HDD.

The Rust update had the same issues but after clearing the download cache in the steam settings I could install the update which was around 380 MB.

But Rust is installed on my SSD.


So anyone have an idea why is the disk usage is at 100% while network is at 0% and it takes painstakingly long for a small update to finish?

This hasn't happened before. I have enough space and when I do other stuff my hard drive doesn't have problems like this.

edit: so I read on another post that games are made up from a few large files and when those get edited it needs to download the whole file again or something like that. So in the case of SQUAD which takes up 60 GB, it would make sense but I don't have any problem downloading and the update itself isn't big so I'm still puzzled.

[Komrade]

Normal, your internet is just waiting for the disk and the cpu to unpack and reallocate files. It's the way Steam downloads work, highly compressed.

[Dan Jackiel's]

Originally posted by christmaS:

Normal, your internet is just waiting for the disk and the cpu to unpack and reallocate files. It's the way Steam downloads work, highly compressed.

Okay but usually steam updates doesn't take hours to be completed, especially these smaller sized one (small size compared to a 15 GB update)

[Komrade]

https://prnt.sc/qcse5m

Just installed the Rust update, took a little while and high disk usage, might be an issue on your end.

[Komrade]

Give it a few more minutes, if the green line remains high, the game is updating.

[Komrade]

How big is your SSD and how much free space is left? As SSDs are filled, write speeds slow down significantly while read speeds remain the same.

[Dan Jackiel's]

Originally posted by christmaS:

How big is your SSD and how much free space is left? As SSDs are filled, write speeds slow down significantly while read speeds remain the same.

https://prnt.sc/qcsha7

Mine is updating as well but it's really slow.

the Rust update went fine probably because it's on an SSD.

I actually didn't catch it when it updated.

I assume you have it installed on an SSD as well based on how fast the disk usage is, mine is 10% of that.

That might be the reason why it's so slow but I have all my games installed on my HDD always have been.

My SSD is 120GB and there is 32,5 GB free space on it. And my HDD is 1 TB and have 250 GB free space.

Anyway thanks for the response.

[Komrade]

Originally posted by YesterMaster:

Originally posted by christmaS:

How big is your SSD and how much free space is left? As SSDs are filled, write speeds slow down significantly while read speeds remain the same.

https://prnt.sc/qcsha7

Mine is updating as well but it's really slow.

the Rust update went fine probably because it's on an SSD.

I actually didn't catch it when it updated.

I assume you have it installed on an SSD as well based on how fast the disk usage is, mine is 10% of that.

That might be the reason why it's so slow but I have all my games installed on my HDD always have been.

My SSD is 120GB and there is 32,5 GB free space on it. And my HDD is 1 TB and have 250 GB free space.

Anyway thanks for the response.

Yeah Rust is on my SSD, the Squad update seems normal, just slow because it's on a hard drive.

[deep2k4]

Heya! I was struggling for a while now with a very similar issue and searching for more generalized terms finally brought up the solution mentioned in this post
(may need to scroll a bit down to the top post there describing how to use symlinks)

It works hilariously well in those scenarios where you have a very large but also very slow HDD that Steam is using seemingly automatically for all the download caching stuff no matter what. For some games like RUST this just takes soooo long, because its transferring like all the games files through the slow HDD to put them back together on your fast SSD/NVMe later on. You can check if thats the case by opening your task manager and switching to "performance" tab. Here one can observe what Disk is actually used while updating your Game. And thats the one you gonna want to add those mentioned symlinks to, to kinda reroute the traffic, therefore avoiding the huge bottleneck by force.
I didnt create new folders and just made the symlinks point to Steams downloading and temp folders on my fast NVMe, where also RUST is installed anyways, and plenty of free disk space left too.
But from there on its also your own responsibility making sure having enough free space on your linked drive. In my opinion not a big pain for this enforced massive update speed gain. Have fun anyone thats going through the same pain so many years after this post was created getting stuck on those archived discussions that just offer no solution for this precise problem. :D

[Mike]

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