Steam HDD write speed is extremely slow

[guilera]

Hello,

My Steam client is always extremely slow during installations and updates, I've got a 700Mb/s internet connection, and when using other clients such as Epic and Battle Net, I get 50MB/s download speed, and I can install 30GB games in about half an hour, but with Steam, even a 30GB game, will take about 3 or 4 hours, averaging 5MB/s.

I`ve tried everything, even bought a new pc, but the slow speed persists, installs, UNINSTALLS (!), and even worse, updated, these are the absolute worst.

Fresh install with only steam.

My Steam is in an SSD, and the games are on a dedicated HDD, when steam is installing, the disk is always at 100%, with Steam being the sole user.

[Ettanin]

Originally posted by guilera:

My Steam is in an SSD, and the games are on a dedicated HDD, when steam is installing, the disk is always at 100%, with Steam being the sole user.

Normal, unless you use a m.2 NVMe PCIe SSD. Steam, while capable of saturating gigabit lines, is made optimal around the 100 MBit/s rate.

Steam is very I/O intensive:
1. Decrypt step
2. Decompress step
3. Read file and patch in parallel while writing new file of the resulting delta
4. Delete old file

All of these four steps happen at the same time for every chunk of data, while being downloaded.

This ensures two things:
1. Saved bandwidth
2. Files being backed up in case of a patching failure so that a complete reinstallation can be avoided.

To alleviate the issue a little, keep at least three times the installation size of the game as free space, or at least 20% of your drive's capacity if that is impossible.

[Joke]

Take a look at this post. It's from someone else who had the same problem, and found a solution.
https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/1/5241649843381286844/#c3719440592186634639

In short, turn off windows drive caching for the drive.

The rest of the thread is also interesting. It would seem caching should improve performance, but some drives seems to have problems with it.

[guilera]

Thank you for the explanation Ettanin,

Just making sure I got you: This is normal expected behavior because Steam is I/O intensive, and only a NVME would be likely to solve the issue?

[guilera]

Thanks Joke, had already disabled cache on the drive but didnt make a difference

[ReBoot]

Originally posted by guilera:

Thank you for the explanation Ettanin,

Just making sure I got you: This is normal expected behavior because Steam is I/O intensive, and only a NVME would be likely to solve the issue?

Only an SSD. Doesn't have to be an NVMe one, SATA SSDs work just as well. Technically, nowhere near as well but in practice, they're fine. Better than HDDs, that's for sure.

[Mišmil]

Hahaha, it takes me around 3 hours to download a 3 GB game, fear my patience!

It downloads at 1MB/s by the way.

On a side note, can someone tell me where i can find the soundtracks and artwork for the games i bought?

I plan to install Metro and play it... five days from now. Haha...