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!!!!

[RadRick01]

I think they are reading all the files on your drive and spying. There is no reason to spent that amount of time!

[Kr阮øƒ]

Originally posted by Gkn29:

Originally posted by mattf0124:

Why does it take so long just to map out disk space.....a few minutes, sure.....but sometimes this can take well over 2 hours.....sometimes bigger games take less than smaller....sometimes not, its all pretty random.....and VERY aggravating when you are loading a sizeable library on a new system......

Why are you responding as if no one is replying to your thread?

Pay attention to the answers.

^^ Dikfore, he is asking again because answers like " Download at night" and "Its just the way it is" arent answering his question. So how about if you dont know the answer you s t f u. I have the same issue on my SSD. That isnt the problem. It is something to do with the way steam and certain games extract and allocate files.

[Dosedmonkey]

Okay it seems to not be happening all the time. But there is plenty of space on my hardrive and now sometimes games the last couple of weeks have taken liturally 30-45 to allocate space, and the download can be as small as 100mb, not important... any ideas?

I know how it works. But what is going wrong?

[BigZara]

Time greatly reduced by view --> setings --> downloads --> clear download cache

[Bad 💀 Motha]

Originally posted by mattf0124:

Originally posted by MiSOKΛ:

Why are you responding as if no one is replying to your thread?

Pay attention to the answers.

I am not getting the answers I need, I am getting the same replies as usual.

Please try this. It's worked for me for many things regarding F-ups with Steam after certain Updates it has gone through over the years.

https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/1/1736595227847318787/

Any mechanical HDD, take the time to fully Defrag it also. And do this about once per month, or after periods of adding large amounts of data to said drive.
Use a good app for this too, like Piriform Defraggler.

If you continue to have issues; run CHKDSK /F /R on your Seagate Firecuda drive.
When this is done, defrag that drive fully, then reboot when done and attempt to reinstall effected game to said drive. Allow the system to remain idle during a pre-allocation process. Ensure crap like all the Microsoft Data Collection and Telemtry in your OS is disabled and things like Windows Updates are not running. In Win10, enable Game Mode if you wish to keep WU from running while you're doing game related stuff and dont want that interfering, such as downloading in the background.

[Bad 💀 Motha]

Originally posted by invas0r:

https://dis cord.gg/NnYgbW8

Just add the person on Steam and speak to them, don't post this trashy spam crap on Steam.

[jbdub82]

Originally posted by PseudoNymNZ:

Original poster is correct: it takes an excessive and illogical amount of time (regardless of hardware) to do the pre-allocation... 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.

Thank you! It's crazy how many "disk experts" are answering this question with nonsense. Like you said, reserving space just involves telling the OS "Hey, I want this much space on this drive", then the OS reads the FAT and reserves the space. There's no reason to write actual data to the drive before that process... the space has been reserved already and can't be "stolen" during the download.
And the part I bolded is what led me to search out this thread in the first place. I'm installing games on a new machine and I noticed halfway through that most of the downloads were canceled (without telling me) because it couldn't just queue up the entire installation process for each game while I went on to install another one. Mind-bogglingly stupid.

Originally posted by Secret Squirrel:

The first thing that happens, in this "creating local files" phase, is in the "downloading" directory (under SteamApps, which is under the Steam Library that has been selcted or is the default), every file that will eventually be there is created with the file sizes that will eventually filled, but with null data. The reason for this is to grab the disk access and "reserve" it.

While you may be correct (and thank you for checking to see what's happening instead of just uselessly answering "it's allocating space and your drive is slow" like the earliest replies), it still isn't necessary for a program to reserve disk space by manually writing fake files. There's a possibility that it's somehow trying to find contiguous space on its own (although how, I don't know, because the OS shouldn't give processes direct access to the FAT), but that still wouldn't necessitate actually writing to the disk just to reserve that space.

[Secret Squirrel]

Think of it like a restaurant reservation.to get a table for 8 just takes an instant to put down 8. But your group shows up and finds there us room for 8, but not all together. This is because the idiotic person managing reservations doesn't understand people want to sit and eat together. That is how the OS manages files physically.

If you want to be certain your files are contiguous then you have to put someone in the seats to physically reserve continuous space. That takes a little more time and is IO intensive.

It is worth noting, in the years this thread has been going, I've still only seen this happen on systems with disk IO bottlenecks, and when that is corrected this is no longer an issue.

[AlienC]

Originally posted by Crusher:

Anyone who has suggested using a Solid State Drive is correct. Speeds to allocate space are 50 times faster than Hard Disks. A 500 GB disk costs about 100 dollars these days. But if you need a Terabyte of space online retailers sell SSD/s up to, and beyond, a TB.

I remember a long long time ago like before SSD's were even invented or announced I remembered the greatest thing about the new technology that Solid State Disk storage would bring was not just the super fast or low access times that would affect boot loading and game loading times but disk allocation activities which take up a lot of steam time especially when installing or uninstalling many games.

I still prefer mechanical hard drives just because they are a lot cheaper by a factor of 6 to 10 and honestly the increased load times is not a deal breaker for me as in a large majority of games the time saved is not that immense to me.

I know I might be in the minority on this one but capacity > speed especially for budget gamers and large game collectors.

[AlienC]

Originally posted by fauxtronic:

Originally posted by jbdub82:

Thank you! It's crazy how many "disk experts" are answering this question with nonsense. Like you said, reserving space just involves telling the OS "Hey, I want this much space on this drive", then the OS reads the FAT and reserves the space. There's no reason to write actual data to the drive before that process... the space has been reserved already and can't be "stolen" during the download.

I'm pretty sure no such Windows API call exists. I'd love to be proven wrong though. Which API call (or namespace) allows one to actually reserve a certain amount of HDD space and prevent said space from being utilised by other applications?

After reading this statement I think it is time for a new OS or at least a revamp at the very least.

[ReBoot]

As a matter of fact, such an API exists. And Steam used it in the past. Then some morons came along claiming that Steam steals their data because the files created using this API happened to contain whatever material the clusters now used had before (meaning that files that had been on the HDD previously now had their content sort of projected into files freshly preallocated by Steam).
At least that's why I think why Valve switched the method. Wouldn't be the first case of "a couple morons ruining things for everyone".

[Secret Squirrel]

Originally posted by Self Realization:

Originally posted by fauxtronic:

I'm pretty sure no such Windows API call exists. I'd love to be proven wrong though. Which API call (or namespace) allows one to actually reserve a certain amount of HDD space and prevent said space from being utilised by other applications?

After reading this statement I think it is time for a new OS or at least a revamp at the very least.

I also use mechanical HDD's to store games, because the sizes of modern games would be very expensive to put on SSD. If one wants to use mechanical drives, then hardware RAID striping really is needed.

The reason is because it improves performance. Most go with a stripe set across 3 drives. That means your system can read/write to 3 drives in parallel.

And you really want your OS on its own physical disk. And you really want to exclude your steamapps directory and its children from windows indexing.

[BubbaFett]

Originally posted by Satoru:

Preallocation happens so that the system knows that the space actually exists to install the game. Otehrwise you could start the download, then half way through run out because you decided to download every linux iso on the planet.

I got my laptop fixed, and for team fortress two it took about an hour and the allocating time was almost instant, now it has been almost thirty minutes and isn't half way there, and it says that it will take anywhere from 11 hours to seven. I don't understand this as the laptop has the same hardwear it was only fixed because the case was bending. also I don't understand why it can immediately tell me how much space I have left on the computer, tell me how much space the game is, but still need hours to see if I have space despite telling me I do beforehand.

[Secret Squirrel]

Without seeing some diagnostics, in particularly performance counters related to file i/o and broken out by process, it is impossible to say why it takes this long on your system.
People that see this happening at times, and other times it is fine, it is because of other processes also competing for file i/o.

Disk queue length is a good metric for troubleshooting this. I am sure disk queue will be well over 1 when this happens. It should be well under 1 on a system with healthy performance storage.

Your choices are to live with it, to determine what other processes are making it unbearable and stopping them, or revisit your storage hardware and layout.

[BubbaFett]

i restarted my computor a couple of times if it doesnt work the first time for me the entire day i had restarted it until my brother did it once when i was going to sleep and it worked so it is completely random