HDD Download slower than the PCs drive?

[☾Đomstryą☽]

I have a HDD Seagate barracuda 4TB hard drive and I installed it 2 days ago and it's been like 5 hours to download this game (ark) and it would only take 15 minutes for my PCs drive to download is there a way to work a way around this? I don't know if downloading on the PCs main drive then transfer to the HDD drive will work
it's specs are:
Storage Capacity: 4 TB
Spindle Speed (rpm): 5400
Buffer: 128 MB
Drive Interface: SATA
Drive Interface Standard: SATA/600

[Cathulhu]

You most likely have an SSD as the main drive and unless you have a really bad one without DRAM cache, will always be a lot better than a HDD.

ARK additionally is notoriously known for having a really inefficient file system, which is more obvious when HDDs are involved.

[-=SOF=-WID99]

also steam downloads are compressed ,,,,so yes it will down load in chunks then de compress then install ..this may take time

[☾Đomstryą☽]

Originally posted by -=SOF=-WID99:

also steam downloads are compressed ,,,,so yes it will down load in chunks then de compress then install ..this may take time

I don't want to see if it verifies all that next

[☾Đomstryą☽]

Originally posted by Cathulhu:

You most likely have an SSD as the main drive and unless you have a really bad one without DRAM cache, will always be a lot better than a HDD.

ARK additionally is notoriously known for having a really inefficient file system, which is more obvious when HDDs are involved.

This HDD was a gift, next time I will get a SSD then that isnt so expensive, I keep being told that I need more ram but it's 16 GB

[Cathulhu]

16GB is good enough most of the time, but more and more becoming entry level. More than good enough for ARK though.

[☾Đomstryą☽]

Originally posted by Cathulhu:

16GB is good enough most of the time, but more and more becoming entry level. More than good enough for ARK though.

Also what happens when I download it on my main drive (The faster downloadable way) then move that to my HDD drive? would that change anything or would transfer take as long as a download

[plat]

Much less likely but it could be coincidental that either the game site's servers are slow at this time or you picked a time that your ISP may be throttling your speeds.

Either possibility is slight but happens on occasion. You can verify your Internet speed with something like Ookla--just for funsies.

https://www.speedtest.net/

[_I_]

5400hdd is slower than dirt

get a ssd for the os, and a 2-4tb 7200rpm hdd for games

[emoticorpse]

Has to be the internet connection

[☾Đomstryą☽]

Originally posted by _I_:

5400hdd is slower than dirt

get a ssd for the os, and a 2-4tb 7200rpm hdd for games

those things are hella expensive and I have to get a 2.5 size

[_I_]

its $100 for a 4tb 7200rpm hdd

for any 2.5in get a ssd, never a hdd, those hdds are even slower

if you have a ssd and a hdd and must use the 2.5in hdd
install the game on the ssd, then move it to the ssd after its installed

[CursedPanther]

Switch off any VPN service that you may be running.

Another thing you can try is to manually switch to a different Steam download server, preferably one that is located in a major city and it doesn't even have to be one in your country either. Years of experience on Steam has told me that the supposedly closest server located near you almost never provide the best download speed. Everything still very much depends on the actual capacity of the server cluster you've chosen.

[☾Đomstryą☽]

Originally posted by CursedPanther:

Switch off any VPN service that you may be running.

Another thing you can try is to manually switch to a different Steam download server, preferably one that is located in a major city and it doesn't even have to be one in your country either. Years of experience on Steam has told me that the supposedly closest server located near you almost never provide the best download speed. Everything still very much depends on the actual capacity of the server cluster you've chosen.

yeah I'm in Cali but it's only faster on my main drivers

[eqalidan]

Originally posted by ☾Đomstryå☽:

I have a HDD Seagate barracuda 4TB hard drive and I installed it 2 days ago and it's been like 5 hours to download this game (ark) and it would only take 15 minutes for my PCs drive to download is there a way to work a way around this? I don't know if downloading on the PCs main drive then transfer to the HDD drive will work
it's specs are:
Storage Capacity: 4 TB
Spindle Speed (rpm): 5400
Buffer: 128 MB
Drive Interface: SATA
Drive Interface Standard: SATA/600

this is 100% dependant on download speed, ark is a 60gb game, for me the raw download would take around 45 minutes.
then you have decompression, which is cpu based along with hdd so there will be a bottleneck somewhere
then you have fragmentation which could really up the time it takes to do anything by orders of magnitude depending on how bad it is

if you want an ssd, you will need 2tb, games seem to be inflateing again, cod is already at 200gb, gta was 72gb at launch, when I deleted it it was over 100gb, tekken 7 is 80gb, I know stalker 2 is supposed to be over 200gb,

games that would really take advantage of ssd installs seem to be inflateing in size and if you want to keep several games installed at a time, you will need some space, personally i'm moving to a 2tb nvme soon, just have some things to get done first.

but yea, make sure the drive is not operating in a fallback mode, I forget what its called, one time I had a bad sata cable and the drive would revert to a fall back that instead of doing 120mb reads and writes, it would get 700kb read and writes, making the computer (it was a boot drive) 100% unuseable.

[_I_]

decompressing on the same drive is always hdd limited