Allocating disk space can take hours for large games

[mattf0124]

I have been experiencing problem for years on many machines, present system is an Acer Predator Helios 300 laptop, i7 7700HQ/ 16GB ram / 6GB GTX1060 / 256GB M.2 SATA SSD / 2TB Firecuda Hybrid drive (where Steam and games are installed) , before the download starts, the allocation operation can take hours for games say 25 GB or larger (which is most these days).....I have brought this up before and routinely search for solutions but always strike out, I find many with this issue but no solutions......everything is fine once downloaded, but this makes downloading a royal pain, you also cant queue other downloads until the allocation process is complete......HELP!!!!

[WarWeeny]

Originally posted by nateslayer360:

Should use a SSD, its much quicker

doesn't matter...
Many also have problems including people to allocate on an ssd.

[Faser]

OMG guys. It does not matter what kind of disk you use. It does the same thing on an M.2 drive with tested read and writes well over 1GBps. I have a gigabit fiber connection to the internet and it still takes forever. Im sick of hearing it is your IO. NO IT IS NOT!

[Aqua/H2O/Water (Stay hydrated)]

Sorryy about this if the OP is still reading this and this hasn't been said, one of numerous things that happens could be that your HD is simply just too big to write fast enough, another thing is if your system isn't defragged every so often the storage could be messy as all hell making it hard for the drive to properly allocate, meaning it will write a little there, come across a load of messy data that it has to skip and write a little more and repeat, another thing which is unlikely for OP is that your system could be deleting/writing over "Deleted" Memory, when you delete something technically it's not "Deleted" it's just marked as write over it when storage is needed, meaning it can take a while when downloading stuff when you just deleted a bunch of crap.

[HexCaliber]

I have this problem trying to install to a brand new, empty, 7200rpm 2Tb Sata III drive . I even ran a comprehensive disk scan and benchmarked the drive and there are zero issues, antivirus on or off doesn't matter. The pc has 32gb of ddr4 4000 mem, an Intel 8700k cpu on an Asus Rog maximus hero 10 motherboard.

Its steam messing something up, there is no practical reason for allocating to take so long on a completely empty drive.

[HexCaliber]

Originally posted by Tnamrod:

S another thing which is unlikely for OP is that your system could be deleting/writing over "Deleted" Memory, when you delete something technically it's not "Deleted" it's just marked as write over it when storage is needed, meaning it can take a while when downloading stuff when you just deleted a bunch of crap.

This is complete nonsense. The drive contains a master file table, all allocated sectors are stored there, when you delete files the corresponding entry in the MFT is removed, once removed, as far as the OS is concerned those previously allocated sectors are empty. Further, io errors notwithstanding, writing to previously allocated sectors takes no longer than writing to those same sectors when the drive was brand spanking new.

[Secret Squirrel]

Originally posted by HexCaliber:

I have this problem trying to install to a brand new, empty, 7200rpm 2Tb Sata III drive . I even ran a comprehensive disk scan and benchmarked the drive and there are zero issues, antivirus on or off doesn't matter. The pc has 32gb of ddr4 4000 mem, an Intel 8700k cpu on an Asus Rog maximus hero 10 motherboard.

Its steam messing something up, there is no practical reason for allocating to take so long on a completely empty drive.

I doubt you have "this" problem because the problem that spawned this thread was that it takes hours. I doubt yours is taking hours just to get pas the preallocation phase, but is taking longer than you expect it to take. Can you start by giving some numbers to quantify the time it takes?

Also, while you are at it, run resmon and look at "disk" and note the disk utilization % and also the disk queue length while the preallocation phase is running. Also, note the processes accessing files on that disk, and be sure that steam is the only process with disk activity.

And just to clarify, when you say "new" and "empty" I assume that means literally a new, empty disk in addition to the disk holding the OS, and the only thing on that drive is the steam library, and nothing on that drive is included in the scope of indexing and also not enabled for "previous versions".

[PseudoNymNZ]

Original poster is correct: it takes an excessive and illogical amount of time (regardless of hardware) to do the pre-allocation. The issue happens on multiple systems and on brand new empty SSDs, with some games of eg 10GB taking seconds and other games taking much longer. The impact if you have a new PC/HDD and want to install eg 50 games is that you can't queue up games to install (when you try to add another game to download queue while a game is pre-allocating, it cancels the in-progress preallocation and installation).
For those who don't understand how a file system works, pre-allocation just uses the file allocation table (hence both have allocation in the name), it does NOT actually have to write eg 40GB of empty data to your disk. It is the opposite of uninstalling a 40GB game, ie when you delete files, you don't write 40GB of empty data, you just update the file allocation table. Pre-allocation of a 40GB game should logically take the same amount of time as the uninstall of a 40GB game.

[AlienC]

SSD only affects access times guys so the rate at which the drive accesses the data that is already on there afaik.

This is writing to disk aka preallocating making space and writing placeholder data to save that space akin to reserving a table at a restaurant for a booking so that it can download and write the real data to that space..

read and write speeds between hdd and ssd's are the same afaik someone please correct me on that

do not confuse read access times (which ssd's excel at and mainly allow programs to run faster aka loading times) with read and write speeds (not times) which is how much data can be transferred onto the disk both on and off it.. reading is obviously the rate at which it can see data and write is the rate at which it can transfer data on

access speed times vs writing and read times are two very different things

[Secret Squirrel]

AlienC, SSD's have improved write times over HDD because there is no physical medium that gas to rotate to the write location in order to write.

That said, SSD devices are not all created equal. Some are faster than others. My SSD was bought when the technology was still new, and unknown to me at the time I paid a premium for an SSD that was much slower than most at the time.

SsDs have a mechanism in their firmware that handles queuing and mapping requests to the right NAND cells. The efficiency of this aspect of an SSD is what makes some incredibly fast and others barely better than a good HDD.

Both SSD and HDD technologies perform best (read and erite) when the data being read/written is sequential on the disk physical medium.

This is a big part of why the steam download process is designed. If is doing more than reserving space -- it is also making it as sequential as possible.

In the restaurant analogy, it is more than reserving a table. It is like reserving and sitting in the seats so the table cant be reclaimed by others by circumventing the reservation system.

But also, by sending actual people to sit in those seats, also guarantees those seats are sequential. An auditorium reservation system is a better analogy.

The various file system technologies dont reserve physical space sequentially. So to do that you have to buy the seats and put butts in them sequentially

[decimus28]

It's interesting to see that it takes this long for some people, I've never seen it take more than a few minutes using 5tb and 10tb HDD. Complaints range from small to big HDD, SSD, new drives, old fragmented drives. Just all over the place.

[Zannah]

decimus that is exactly why the issue confuses me so much.

[Purple Toupee]

FWIW, I was having this issue (NBA2K19, taking literally all day to make space on a machine that has never had this problem before).

I FOUND MY ISSUE.

It turned out that a Defrag (piriform defraggler, in my case) run from last night was still going when I started, and the two things were starving each other of IO. Stopping the background defrag made my steam throughput (measured in resmon) go from 4MB/s to 100MB/s.

The weird thing is that resmon wasn't showing the defrag process as using much IO. So it took me a long time to notice it.

[Akimbo]

Fixed with:
Settings > Downloads > "Clear download cache"

[smolgumball]

I was able to speed this up significantly be disabling Windows Defender "Real-time protection" in the "Virus & threat protection" section of the Windows Defender Security Center.

[Blas]

There is no need to write anything to a file to allocate space for it. In windows you can just set the filesize of a handle, the only work needed is within the file system tables (FAT32, NTFS) and it takes no more than a second or two for 100s of gigabytes. As far as I could research in 2 minutes you can do the same thing on MacOS, Linux, iIOS, Android.
Why are they writing to the files?