reserving storage space takes forever

[un1corn]

whenever I download or update any game the "reserving space" before the download simply takes forever and even longer than the actual download. Has anyone had similar experiences or has any suggestions what might cause this problem?
Thanks in advance

[Cathulhu]

What brand and model is the drive and what file format is it formatted in?

[un1corn]

its a Sandisk portable ssd. I dont know how to look up the file format it is formatted in tbh

[Cathulhu]

Brand and model please.

By default external drives are formatted in either FAT32 or exFAT. If it's the former, then you should at least use exFAT, if you use the drive on other PCs or NTFS if it is solely used by the one PC.

Anyway, depending on how fast the USB port on your PC and the external drive is you have a possible bottleneck there. Then you added overhead by protocol translation (PC-->USB-->SATA).
And then there's the question of the SSD itself. If it is one without a DRAM cache, then it will have abysmal performance when processing data, like installing games.

So, we need more information if you want proper advice and/or help.

[un1corn]

The brand is SanDisk, as I said before
Model number is: SDSSDE30-1T00, in the 1TB variant
Yes, the drive is mainly used by one PC and connected via a USB 3.0 port, which should not cause a bottleneck as far as I know.
I hope this helps!

[Cathulhu]

Oof.
This thing is slow for an SSD.

520MB per second reading or writing? That is slow.
And of course it lacks a DRAM Cache which only makes matters worse.
And USB 3.0 is limited to 5 Gigabit, which is slower than SATA 3 which comes in 6 Gigabit per second. But that doesn't really matter as the SSD is so slow, it can't saturate the USB 3.0 connection.

In short, nice as a data dump, but terrible for actively processing data.

Hey, at least it is cheap.

As for comparison, my boot drive offers 5 Gigabyte per second writing and 7 Gigabyte per second reading. So, about ten times the speed and more of your external drive.

[Chaosolous]

I had a similar issue, here is a link to the thread. I had to reformat the drive.

https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/1/5595176692473898389/