Steam is updating a game on SSD, but my HDD is running 100% and bottlenecking the installation meanwhile

[TMRaven]

Hey

My pc was updating New World, which I've placed on my SSD C: drive.
But in the meantime, Steam, and through that, System is using 100% of my secondary drive, a HDD. If I look into my taskmanager and ressource overview, I can see that steam/system is using 100% of my disk and is writing with something like 50-70mb/s, which makes sense if I'm downloading with 25mb/s, but that should be on my SSD. So why is this, if my game and steam is installed at my C: drive, that my other HDD is working like crazy?

This process is bottlenecking my entire pc, as my HDD naturally isn't as fast at my SSD. At the same time, it sounds like the HDD is going through a world of hurt, as it's never been buzzing as much during any installation before, but these steam updates, in particular on other drives, really gets it going.

While this is going on, my access to that drive is almost impossible, having wait times of 10+ seconds, even for a simple pdf document.
I've tried this a few times now, and on both of my secondary HDD's. Actually one of my secondaries is a SSHD, but that one is also working like crazy and at 100% if steam is updating(technically Epic games too, but that is another matter).

Any thougths?

[Cathulhu]

Steam uses other drives if the drive where the game is installed, does not have enough free space for storing the game, the patch files and the temporary space needed to process the update.

[TMRaven]

But if the update is 4gb, the game is 45gb, the update say the game is only around 40gb and I have 50gb free, shouldn't that be enough?

[TMRaven]

I thought I had 50gb free, but the installation just finished and freed up like 16ish gb, so now it's 66gb free. Something fishy about that update is going on, and it doesn't make sense.

[Cathulhu]

Game files may need to be decompressed for patching, so that can increase the temporary space needed to apply the patch. I strongly recommend getting more free space, or just download the whole game again depending on the speed of your connection.

In some cases that can actually be faster than updating on slow drives.

[crunchyfrog]

Originally posted by TMRaven:

But if the update is 4gb, the game is 45gb, the update say the game is only around 40gb and I have 50gb free, shouldn't that be enough?

Nope.

There's a few things you need to remember for Steam.

First off, NEVER go over 90% usage for the drives. Do this and you will get weird behaviour. Downloads slow down, or go to other drives or just stop etc.

Also games are compressed and encrypted so you need to aloow up to THREE times the download size for it to do it's work.

So for example, if you had a 1TB drive and had used 800GB, that's 80% so you have 100GB left to play with comfrotably. But if you then go to download an 80GB you won't have enough space.

So in your case, you're over the limit.

[Schlubaka]

I have the same Problem, but the Game I am Updating would fit 3 times on my SSD. How does that make sense?

[Runner]

I just had this for Aliens Fireteam Elite, which is under 40gb, patch is 5gb and free space is 69.
Maybe Steam just hates us now.

[Steve]

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