Steam using the wrong drive for an update?

[LoyalScorpian]

So I'm currently in the process of updating Helldivers II.
I have the game installed to my SSD (Drive E:) as well as steam installed on my E: Drive

I use my HDD (G: Drive) to store games so I can swap them over between my HDD and my SSD without having to redownload them again.

Note: I have only installed Helldivers II onto my SSD, never had it on my HDD.

Okay so, I'm very confused as my update speeds are very slow (3+ hours for a 6GB update) despite using an SSD for both the game files and steam files

Screenshots of stuff: https://imgur.com/a/6ZuVAVh

I am completely out of my depth here so any help would be appreciated

[Satoru]

Steam will use a different drive for updates if the drive the game is on does not have enough space to peform the patching process.

If you patching is taking 3 hours its because your anti-virus killing the performance of the patching.

[MancSoulja]

You probably don't have enough space for the update to download, unpack and install on your E drive.

[Souza Daniel Felips BEM-VINDA MG]

Originally posted by MancSoulja:

You probably don't have enough space for the update to download, unpack and install on your E drive.

[tintingaroo]

Here's a method to set the drive/Library Steam should use for the staging process for the game:

https://steamcommunity.com/app/346110/discussions/0/1748980761793517929/?ctp=2#c2605804632884209459


I don't know about your case nor other factors that goes into Steam's decision making but doesn't look necessarily due to space. There are comments from users with sufficient space on their SSD but Steam decided upon their HDD for DL/staging.

[Third Sky Echo]

I have the exact same thing today. I have the game and steam installed on C which is NVME. A ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ 60Mb, apparently needs more than 100 gigs to update th game, so it attempted using HDD library for it, with ETC of more than 2 hours. I didn't want to wait 2 hours to play so i simply... deleted the game, and redownloaded it for 20 minutes.

[Satoru]

Originally posted by tintingaroo:

Here's a method to set the drive/Library Steam should use for the staging process for the game:

https://steamcommunity.com/app/346110/discussions/0/1748980761793517929/?ctp=2#c2605804632884209459


I don't know about your case nor other factors that goes into Steam's decision making but doesn't look necessarily due to space. There are comments from users with sufficient space on their SSD but Steam decided upon their HDD for DL/staging.

Note Steam looks at the total space as well as how much would be left over even from a temporary perspective. It won’t download to a drive if the free space will drop below a threshold. While not as much of an issue on NTFS, FAT tends to have issues when you get very low on disk space on a drive. Steam won’t let the total space drop to like 5% as that can impact the performance since steam patching is very disk IO intensive

[Chronocide]

@LoyalScorpian: Someone was posting that internet connecting to steam was really spotty the other day, and it turned out that it was a country wide thing for France relating to some attempt to prevent the football (soccer) match from being pirated. I know you aren't in France.

Maybe it's a stretch, but just saying could be slow for reasons outside your control. Might be the kind of thing where if you wait a day or two, it'll no longer be an issue without any action on your end.

From your story, I'd assume the issue is that your disk is too full. You can't fill them to the max, they need room to "move around in." I suggest no more than 75% full.

PS: pictures and movie files take up a lot of space, if looking for fat to trim from a drive, check to see if you've been saving pictures or movies that you can afford to part with.

[LoyalScorpian]

I've cleaned out my disk space, thank you for the suggestions everyone. Turns out it was pretty full, I didn't realise it needed to have enough storage for the entire game size AGAIN ontop of the size of the game already.
I've also looked into that "staging" thing and set it to the correct folder

Cheers

[Nitroband]

Me and a Friend are both having this issue with plenty of space on the SSD we have it on and its going through the wrong much slower driver for each of us. Gonna try the staging thing, this is weird and only happening with HD2, so it might be a problem on their end.

I have discovered that the ONLY Appmanifest file for steam that had a Staging Folder line in it was HD2, meaning that either Arrowhead or Valve screwed up its Appmanifest File to have a specific custom set Staging Folder of "1" which is Drive 2 thus ignoring whatever drive it might be on and always updating on Drive 2.

[Satoru]

Originally posted by Nitroband:

Me and a Friend are both having this issue with plenty of space on the SSD we have it on and its going through the wrong much slower driver for each of us. Gonna try the staging thing, this is weird and only happening with HD2, so it might be a problem on their end.

I have discovered that the ONLY Appmanifest file for steam that had a Staging Folder line in it was HD2, meaning that either Arrowhead or Valve screwed up its Appmanifest File to have a specific custom set Staging Folder of "1" which is Drive 2 thus ignoring whatever drive it might be on and always updating on Drive 2.

Note "plenty of space" is relative

Games like Payday2 or BG3 or POE2 basically have to patch the entire game, so you need as much space as the game takes up to patch the game. If you have 50GB free this is not 'plenty of space' to patch these games. In these scenarios, where you do not have enough space, steam will patch the files on a different drive.

Do NOT mess around with the appmanifest as if you ever actually don't have space, you will totally screw yourself over.

[Satoru]

Originally posted by LoyalScorpian:

I've cleaned out my disk space, thank you for the suggestions everyone. Turns out it was pretty full, I didn't realise it needed to have enough storage for the entire game size AGAIN ontop of the size of the game already.
I've also looked into that "staging" thing and set it to the correct folder

Cheers

Modern Windows is surprisingly forgiving for having even 0 bytes free on the OS drive. I've had servers keep running fine even in this situation. Where as before performance would deteriorate rapidly as it got closer to 0% free, and then at 0% the OS just up and died.

If you go to Steam-Settings-Storage you can get a decent birds eye view of your storage usage on each drive at least for how much your steam games are taking up.

You can also run the windows "Disk Cleanup" tool. Generally the only thing that takes up a lot of space here are older Windows Update files, so the amount of space you can save here isn't generally that much.

[ユメ]

[Nitroband]

Originally posted by Satoru:

Originally posted by Nitroband:

Me and a Friend are both having this issue with plenty of space on the SSD we have it on and its going through the wrong much slower driver for each of us. Gonna try the staging thing, this is weird and only happening with HD2, so it might be a problem on their end.

I have discovered that the ONLY Appmanifest file for steam that had a Staging Folder line in it was HD2, meaning that either Arrowhead or Valve screwed up its Appmanifest File to have a specific custom set Staging Folder of "1" which is Drive 2 thus ignoring whatever drive it might be on and always updating on Drive 2.

Note "plenty of space" is relative

Games like Payday2 or BG3 or POE2 basically have to patch the entire game, so you need as much space as the game takes up to patch the game. If you have 50GB free this is not 'plenty of space' to patch these games. In these scenarios, where you do not have enough space, steam will patch the files on a different drive.

Do NOT mess around with the appmanifest as if you ever actually don't have space, you will totally screw yourself over.

Yeah I get the plenty of space point, but I have almost double the space needed for the game available, for some reason though, when I checked every single appmanifest file I had, only Helldivers 2 had a Staging Folder set.

[Satoru]

Originally posted by Nitroband:

Originally posted by Satoru:

Note "plenty of space" is relative

Games like Payday2 or BG3 or POE2 basically have to patch the entire game, so you need as much space as the game takes up to patch the game. If you have 50GB free this is not 'plenty of space' to patch these games. In these scenarios, where you do not have enough space, steam will patch the files on a different drive.

Do NOT mess around with the appmanifest as if you ever actually don't have space, you will totally screw yourself over.

Yeah I get the plenty of space point, but I have almost double the space needed for the game available, for some reason though, when I checked every single appmanifest file I had, only Helldivers 2 had a Staging Folder set.

Helldivers 2 needs 100GB of free space just to patch teh game, not including the patch file itself which is close to 10GB.

[Nitroband]

Originally posted by Satoru:

Originally posted by Nitroband:

Yeah I get the plenty of space point, but I have almost double the space needed for the game available, for some reason though, when I checked every single appmanifest file I had, only Helldivers 2 had a Staging Folder set.

Helldivers 2 needs 100GB of free space just to patch teh game, not including the patch file itself which is close to 10GB.

oh yeah I had almost 200 open, this shouldnt have been an issue, but it was, friend ran into it too and he had the space as well.