Steam using HDD instead of SSD to update games on SSD

[Roscius]

I have a number of games installed on my SSD and both of my 2 HDD drives. When I update a game that is on my SSD or my second HDD Steam will use the first HDD to update it, shooting the disk to 100% for the entire installation and taking hours just to update. I only recently added my HDD drives and that is when this problem started. The SSD is stated as my main drive on Steam and the games are 100% installed onto the SSD, however, the downloading folder in the SSD remains empty whilst the downloading folder in the HDD is producing the update files.

One solution said to go to my steam settings and select the library folders, to which there was no option. Other solutions have been more complicated and have just not worked. Last night I decided I would bite the bullet and update Baldur's Gate 3 despite it taking 4 hours for New World to update. The update ran for about 6 hours to which it only got to 40%. This confuses me because even when I ran an HDD as my main drive it did not take nearly as long to update anything ever. I even uninstalled and redownloaded New World back onto my SSD after the second time an update popped up and it installed in less than 10 minutes. I have no idea how this stuff works and I am definitely out of my depth, so if anybody has help outside of just taking the HDD drives out, it would be greatly appreciated.

[Yujah]

says that's a 150G game (lordie...)

Steam updates may need up to 2 times the game's eventually needed storage space and it seems it's not being smart about that either. Would it be safe to assume you don't have 150G free on your SSD? If so I believe the Steam update will for the updating automatically retreat to a library on a drive with more free, i.e., in your case the HDD library. It may in that case be faster to uninstall and reinstall the game rather than update, of course depending on your network bandwidth.

[Roscius]

Originally posted by Yujah:

says that's a 150G game (lordie...)

Steam updates may need up to 2 times the game's eventually needed storage space and it seems it's not being smart about that either. Would it be safe to assume you don't have 150G free on your SSD? If so I believe the Steam update will for the updating automatically retreat to a library on a drive with more free, i.e., in your case the HDD library. It may in that case be faster to uninstall and reinstall the game rather than update, of course depending on your network bandwidth.

That may be it then as I have 230GB free on my SSD but the HDD it is using to update has 260GB free. I guess I can just install more stuff to the HDD and see if that works. Thank you for the suggestion.

[Yujah]

Mmm. With 230G free on the SSD I believe that should actually be quite enough -- but, well, sure, trying what happens when it has more than the HDD can't hurt I guess. I would personally consider it a mere debugging step, because, really, Steam? ...

[DBR]

Having the same issue with Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. Downloaded a 17GB update and Steam decided to use my hard drive as a cache instead of just downloading to the NVMe 4.0 SSD the game is installed on. And the SSD has 300GB free... wtf Valve?

[nullable]

Originally posted by DBR:

Having the same issue with Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. Downloaded a 17GB update and Steam decided to use my hard drive as a cache instead of just downloading to the NVMe 4.0 SSD the game is installed on. And the SSD has 300GB free... wtf Valve?

Well how is your system configured? Is the main steam install on the HDD or SSD?

[Steve]

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