Downloads from Steam are abysmally slow

[HexxNX]

Hello! I'm having some trouble with how slow my steam is at downloading things. It takes hours to download games that are over a couple of GB, whereas it will only take 10 or so minutes by comparison on my consoles - I've looked around online before now but keep getting turned around and confused, so I figured I'd just post here to see if anyone knows what to do?

For reference, downloads on steam peak for me at around 2MB, but it's way quicker on consoles

[Yujah]

You don't mention system specs, nor e.g. whether or not PC and consoles are both wired or both wireless, or...

One thing that can be commented generally is that Steam downloads trigger a bug (or at least "issue") in Windows' write-caching on some NVMe drives; WD Blue best known but probably most cheaper DRAM-less drives. If that's the context also here try disabling write-caching for your drive(s). If WD (or Samsung I believe) you can do so via the SSD-specific software; could also do directly in Windows itself: https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/21904-enable-disable-disk-write-caching-windows-10-a.html

And if that's not the context -- more context needed.

[HexxNX]

Right - sorry. I was a bit up the wall when I made the original post and didn't think much about what I needed to outline:

The consoles are wireless, as is my pc - running over wifi. As for my system specs I've got an Intel I-7, windows 11, 64gb ram and an nvidia rtx 4070.

I'm just taking a look at the solution you advised, again sorry for the lack of context - fairly new to dealing with PCs

[Yujah]

A note is that I've seen it reported that if you're going through Windows that write-caching needed to be disabled on all all drives and the system rebooted after doing so for it to help. In e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/wqrdtv/comment/j19vd5g/ it's conversely reported that the difference could even be seen in real-time when using the WD SSD software. FWIW...

[HexxNX]

Okay so - I turned off write caching via the device manager > disk drive > Kioxia-exceria G2 SSD (my only disk drive) > policies and then ticked off the box to enable write caching on the device which was previously ticked.

Nothing's really changed though in terms of the download speeds I'm seeing.

[Yujah]

Mmm. If you have in fact rebooted since that'd probably be to say then that the storage angle is a dead end.

https://www.techpowerup.com/ssd-specs/kioxia-exceria-g2-2-tb.d1340 seems to also say it is a decent drive, TLC and with DRAM-cache, so no point in trying to verify HMB support/status and all that...

I'd still make sure that its firmware was fully updated via https://europe.kioxia.com/en-europe/personal/software/ssd-utility.html but I'd otherwise have no specific advise...