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!!!!

[Iceira]

again , its there, again you think you know anything about why its made that way.
please take your crap to suggesstion. , in what steam will do or not i dont care, its there and i can tell you this they will never remove it, if they even know why its done that way. this is your problem not ours. and not my faulth even then i know why , i dont have to explan you 2cent
this is your problem and not educated why it doing this.

if you think anything in it is made for fun , and why 3way handshake is made or other things like this think again. ( self procalmed i think i know better , thats all what you are. you lack all the skill of not reading or know why things are as they are today.

[Iceira]

Lets take this debat in a new direction, If you have any harddisk issue with slowlyness Contact Own Brand Manufactory support , dont forget to tell them pre-allocation is NOT DL that is I/O only and should not take hour's , maybe they want to explan all, and the things every user dont seem to graps, because neather me or steam support is in controll in what people buy and its setup and all the drawback people might have done in what and how things work.

GL with it.

ps.
if harddisk support say steam DL once , they have no clue or use a standard reply on subject then escalation the case to a supervisor.

[crunchyfrog]

引用自 S4taN：

引用自 Iceira：

are you telling us , here with a laptop from 10 years ago is faster then your new laptop. my GFX 560m card and that cant do much can still be faster then a new standard laptop with alot better harddisk. ( it look like my old 486 could be faster then 6mb sec hes top ace pc. )

cant you not see problem most be your end.

I don't know why you're talking about laptops and assuming everyone is on a laptop

Because it's especially common on laptops as part of things like power settings as default. But that DOES NOT mean it's exclusively laptops.

Iceira is correct - you should nail these things down as it can apply to ALL Pcs.

[Iceira]

found some more detail info on old tech, we all dont care about, but i think its relevant then ppl say hours in pre-allocation

Speed

Data transfer speed for IDE ranges from 5MB/s up to 133MB/s (ATA100/133). The parallel wire transfer mode reached its limit with the speed of 133 MB/s.

SATA took off where ATA stopped as far as speed is concerned. The first generation of SATA was 1.2 Gbit/s (150 MB/s; note that MB is megabytes and Gb is gigabits) similar to PATA/133. Today the third generation of SATA (3.0) (released on May 27, 2009), 6 Gbit/s (600 MB/s) hard drives and motherboards are being used.

[The Giving One]

Good stuff, Iceira.

I hope people are not using IDE anymore, but it does make sense with that speed that was posted about. Good info. Thanks.

[crunchyfrog]

引用自 The Giving One：

Good stuff, Iceira.

I hope people are not using IDE anymore, but it does make sense with that speed that was posted about. Good info. Thanks.

Amen to that. Nicely done, Iceira!

There is a weird thing though that I've experienced and others too, but as I'm a lazy sod, I haven't been arsed to track it down.

It's that I run two or three USB external drives. I expect them to run slower (they don't actually though, not so you'd notice) as that means nothing to me.

But the pre-allocation is utterly weird - about 95% of the time, it does it in seconds and immediately goes to download, size of the game being irrelevant largely (though bigger games can take a few more seconds).

But every now and then one game will sit and pre-allocate for several minutes. I bought a load of games yesterday via the sales here and various charity bundles, so I downloaded a load of them. One did this trick again amongst all the rest.

As this is the same time, with the same drives and everything else, it is weird how it happens.

I suspect it may have something to do with how the decompression and decryption works on each game, but as I said, I'm too lazy to look into it.

[MonkehMaster]

引用自 crunchyfrog：

引用自 micro102：

How long does it take to allocate and do you have an SSD or HHD? It took around 10 minutes with my SSD.

I have an SSD but I only have one game on it (7 days to die) because that can take ages to create a new world. I don't run games from SSD as the benefits are barely noticeable (plus I don't like putting stuff on SSDs that will update or change regularly. But that's a bit besides the point).

So yeah, I have it installed on normal hard drive and it took a few minutes to pre-allocate, so that's about right.

Sometimes you will get the odd game that behaves like this. I don't know what to say except that it happens.

For instance, in my case, I bought my current laptop in February after an absence of about 5 years. Since then I've bought well over 100 games (nearer 150). I have installed all but about 15 of them. And out of all of them, I think there were 4 that did this longer pre-allocation thing. Deus Ex Human Revolution was one of them.

So, in your case, I wouldn't have thought that untoward except if it starts happening with EVERY game. As I said, some games installe differently and you need to beware of the 2 cardinal rules I stated. If you run Steam over that 90% full state, you can get issues exactly like this.

running games from SSD is day and night difference, not sure where you get "barely noticeable"...

[MonkehMaster]

引用自 S4taN：

引用自 Iceira：

just because you dont have laptop , dont mean you cant have same issue. cable defect or harddisk issue

my hard disk is fine you clearly dont have a solution why do you bother replying.

agreed, dont bother with these people, they have no answers on the subject other than blaming your computer to divert blame from steam, just ignore them.

this issue with steam preallocation BS has been an issue for a long time now.

the preallocation BS happens on HDD and SSD full or not, old or not...

[The Giving One]

引用自 crunchyfrog：

I suspect it may have something to do with how the decompression and decryption works on each game, but as I said, I'm too lazy to look into it.

I agree, that's probably it. Same here, as it's not so much an issue that would need to worry too much about it. Thanks.

引用自 MonkehMaster：

agreed, dont bother with these people, they have no answers on the subject other than blaming your computer to divert blame from steam, just ignore them.

I am gonna try one more time with you, MonkehMaster, but it's not about 'blame' and it's not about making people feel inferior or at fault.

Some have a problem with this and there is a community that is willing to help them try to fix it. Suggesting things for people to try on their end is not "blaming" them. I really wish you would stop with that bait in all of these threads about this. It just sends negative vibes to start placing "blame".

[micro102]

We just had a conversation about how a single game (Dying Light) preallocated faster on some PCs than others.

We know that its not all games that have this pre-allocation delay, so it's not just the PC.

We know that this delay happens on the same PC regardless of the disk drive used so we know it's not a problem with any HHD or SSD (but SSDs are still much much faster).

We know it's not the same game for all PCs, so it's not the game or steam files themselves.

Only some games are slow on some computers. This necessitates a software problem, which means Steam is in some way responsible for this.

[mm.324]

引用自 The Giving One：

Some have a problem with this and there is a community that is willing to help them try to fix it.

The simplest and quickest fix is for steam to give us the option of turning off the allocating of space. With the size of hard drives now days it serves no purpose.
And let's be honest, some of the people who come to reply to these kind of threads are
condescending steam fanboys who would never admit that something was steam's fault or could've been implemented better.

[Iceira]

we could also make dont have worst possible setup. laptop in batterry mode and mecanical harddisk with partions on disk + 90 full disk , and scatted free space among all files.
and disk is not idle and system doing other stuff while DL other stuff sametime you try pre-allocated space, or OS did Backup same time or file history is update at laptop.

all this has been debat and point out in many threads and other post.
not sure i forgot something ( assuming not have hardware issue )

all this is still every user own problem. and i doubt any can have them all at once but if i recall correctly even seen some say 12hour in pre-allcations. ( thats not possible unless disk doing multi task issue.

and it wont matter what any say here, it seem we have alot of i have played games in many years and know better , this is where you fail, you need to know how harddisk work and sametime a harddisk manufactor , might not know OS and BUILD issue and power scematic, he only focus on the througput and if it doing its job. and its here you have a problem if they are not experience enough in how windows setup and all its limitations and drawback , this is not something you can read , it has take years to learn and graps it all. and yet its so strait forward then you get it.

and this is not about fan of steam, this is about try to help , because if any of them helper was not here, included all the other , even you master monkey, or given or cruzyfrog or other i had disagree with, it will be alot worse and all skilled people will have left along time ago.

i could say maybe test with other pc or friends laptop at your location that will proof you have a own pc issue then it work for others. i have mention that in many threads see it as a tool to confirm its your pc.

this is what happend then you are at end customer tech or has been , you get skills to see through alot of cases , and yes even caught same problem as end customer and get it fix in whatever firewall or from router to isp. ( do note i have nothing to do with people own equipment , but then they have 24/7 service , as respect i take a fast look if customer allowed it.
and no i only have 2-3 minute to spot things, own company cant waste time on other people equipment. there is a line and it stop at the isp router or wallplug.

and trust me on this , to be there can actual solve things , what did not get talked or tell at the support. ( so dont ruleout new fresh eyes on the case either. even that has been done by companys ) this is hands on experience , you cant read about it.

[Petter]

I have ran into this on my new computer.

From a quick check in Resource Monitor, it is clear that Steam is doing the preallocation very inefficiently. There are better APIs on Windows for preallocating than actually writing bytes to the files.

It adds a lot of time for people with 250Mbit/s-1Gbits/s internet connections. I mean, if you leave it overnight, who cares what Steam does?

[Petter]

I just updated Baldur's Gate 3. Maybe 20 minutes spent on preallocating and about 2 minutes actually downloading the 3.59 GB.

Ridiculous. The hard drive is practically empty since the computer is quite new.

EDIT: After finishing the download it spends a lot of time moving files from the download location to the install folder. (According to Resource Monitor, which shows the file names). This would be insane, since moving files should be a no-op.

A two-minute download is approaching a 40-minute update. And people in this thread are mansplaining that there's no problem. Yikes!

[crunchyfrog]

引用自 MonkehMaster：

引用自 crunchyfrog：

I have an SSD but I only have one game on it (7 days to die) because that can take ages to create a new world. I don't run games from SSD as the benefits are barely noticeable (plus I don't like putting stuff on SSDs that will update or change regularly. But that's a bit besides the point).

So yeah, I have it installed on normal hard drive and it took a few minutes to pre-allocate, so that's about right.

Sometimes you will get the odd game that behaves like this. I don't know what to say except that it happens.

For instance, in my case, I bought my current laptop in February after an absence of about 5 years. Since then I've bought well over 100 games (nearer 150). I have installed all but about 15 of them. And out of all of them, I think there were 4 that did this longer pre-allocation thing. Deus Ex Human Revolution was one of them.

So, in your case, I wouldn't have thought that untoward except if it starts happening with EVERY game. As I said, some games installe differently and you need to beware of the 2 cardinal rules I stated. If you run Steam over that 90% full state, you can get issues exactly like this.

running games from SSD is day and night difference, not sure where you get "barely noticeable"...

Two things -

(1) On paper yes, sure many games be a fair amount faster. Others not so much. It completely depends on the game and to what degree.

(2) I never said compared to an SSD. I was comparing an internal drive to an external USB type.