Steam downloads start fast, then slow down to nothing.

[Megapon]

Like the title says, every time I start a steam download of any kind; like installing a game or updating another my download speed starts at around 35mb/s, to then slow down to less than a a single mb/s in the span of a few seconds.

I've already tried:
-changing my download region
-clearing my download cache

If anybody knows the fix you'd make my day, thanks.

[Supafly]

Steam downloads in compressed chunks, once a chunk is down it gets decompressed and installed. If the CPU and/or drive is at or near 100% the DL will slow and may even stop until the decompress and install is complete.

Open Task manager and see what CPU and the Drives usage % is at when this happens

[Megapon]

Originally posted by Supafly:

Steam downloads in compressed chunks, once a chunk is down it gets decompressed and installed. If the CPU and/or drive is at or near 100% the DL will slow and may even stop until the decompress and install is complete.

Open Task manager and see what CPU and the Drives usage % is at when this happens

damn you're right! For some reason my disk usage skyrockets to 100% as soon as I start a download! How could I fix this?

[Megapon]

Originally posted by Supafly:

Steam downloads in compressed chunks, once a chunk is down it gets decompressed and installed. If the CPU and/or drive is at or near 100% the DL will slow and may even stop until the decompress and install is complete.

Open Task manager and see what CPU and the Drives usage % is at when this happens

my cpu is very lax at like 5% usage though

[Cathulhu]

Originally posted by Megapon:

Originally posted by Supafly:

Steam downloads in compressed chunks, once a chunk is down it gets decompressed and installed. If the CPU and/or drive is at or near 100% the DL will slow and may even stop until the decompress and install is complete.

Open Task manager and see what CPU and the Drives usage % is at when this happens

damn you're right! For some reason my disk usage skyrockets to 100% as soon as I start a download! How could I fix this?

Either the drive can't cope with the higher IO demands Steams has, or some software is interfering with the processing of data.

[Megapon]

Originally posted by Cathulhu:

Originally posted by Megapon:

damn you're right! For some reason my disk usage skyrockets to 100% as soon as I start a download! How could I fix this?

Either the drive can't cope with the higher IO demands Steams has, or some software is interfering with the processing of data.

I'm sorry, I'm sure that if I knew a bit more about tech stuff I'd know what to do from here, but I don't, could you give me some advice on a possible next step?

[Supafly]

Originally posted by Megapon:

Originally posted by Supafly:

Steam downloads in compressed chunks, once a chunk is down it gets decompressed and installed. If the CPU and/or drive is at or near 100% the DL will slow and may even stop until the decompress and install is complete.

Open Task manager and see what CPU and the Drives usage % is at when this happens

damn you're right! For some reason my disk usage skyrockets to 100% as soon as I start a download! How could I fix this?

The drive can't handle decompressing, moving data and installing at the same time as writing downloaded data at the same time. Either its a slow drive, HDD, over filled/lacking space for optimisation or it's failing.

If it's a HDD I'd say that it's likely normal because they can be slow.

Whether its a HDD or SSD download and run CrystalDiskMark so you can compare it's speeds against the drives spec sheet to see if it's underperforming, possible drive is failing.