Broadband speed too fast for Steam or too fast for my HDD?

[TheRigGerMortis]

Hey, I got 100mbps internet today and for some reason when I don't limit my download speed in Steam it downloads at 10mb/s for maybe 5 seconds then it'll stop at 0bytes/s for 5 seconds and it'll keep doing this over and over until the game is finished.

When I limit it to 5mbs it just downloads normally at full speed until my downloads are finished.

When I download stuff in Firefox, Chrome or in a download manager there's no issue, they just download at full speed, fluctuating between 9mb/s-14mb/s. I thought it might be my hard drive but I've tested downloads on all my external drives and on my internal C drive and there's no issue.

Has anyone else had this issue or know what the problem might be? I don't want to needlessly limit my download speed. Thanks.

[Satoru]

Your internet speeds are measured in Mega BITS per second

Steam measures mega BYTES per second\

100 mpbs (your ISP) = 12.5 mBps (what steam measures)

Your 10MBps from Steam is fairly close to saturating your ISPs 100mps connection.

Also note that Steam downloads only deltas of games patches then applies them locally. If you're patchign somethign like DOTA2 it'll downlaod/patch/download/patch/download so how it behaves deends.

Constant throroughput usually happens when you're downloading a game for the first time.

If you're still having issues try changing your download region. Note that steam ues standard HTTP to send you stuff so it's pretty simple.

[TheRigGerMortis]

Thanks for the reply, I tried to differentiate the two by writing mbps and mb/s.

Yeah, it was Skyrim I was downloading, I had some problems with sounds not working on an external drive so had to download it twice, it was a good opportunity to test the connection.

The problem only happened when I disabled the bandwidth cap. This is the first time I've had to use the bandwidth cap though, I was just experimenting when I noticed the problem.

This didn't happen when my internet speed was slower, Steam was always saturating my connection yet it never did the "full speed for 5 seconds, 0bytes/s for 5 seconds" thing until today.

I'll see what happens when I change the region.

[TheRigGerMortis]

By the way do all games come from the same servers or for instance does Skyrim link to the Bethesda servers and Half Life link to Valve? I just started downloading Ceville and it was downloading at 20kb/s so I moved Half Life 2 to the top of the list and it's downloading at 7mb/s.