Steam keeps damaging my external SSD

[Zekeram12]

My computer has 3 drives:
C: 200-something GB, Does not have Steam on it nor any games, built-in
D: 1 TB, Has my Steam installation and some game downloads, built-in
E: An external 2TB SSD that I download games onto.

Recently I've been encountering an issue where, upon trying to download a game to my E drive, every single external port on my computer suddenly stops working for about 5 seconds, before coming back online. This usually damages my E drive, forcing me to use the Windows repair. Up until now, this has been nothing more than an inconvenience. However, it happened again today, and this time it seems to have destroyed my entire Steam library folder on the drive. I had to find the several hundred gigabytes that went completely missing by using an external viewing program.
Does anyone know what's causing this? If so, how can I fix this?

[_I_]

do not use steam to install or update games directly to the external drive
usb does not have enough iops for the way steam does that

install game to internal drive, then use steam to move it to the usb drive

when updating, move it back to internal then update, and move back to external

[Zekeram12]

Is there any way to recover my broken files? My viewer says they're currently all Recovered File Fragments.

[_I_]

steam can verity game files, but move them back to internal first

[Zekeram12]

I don't think that'd be much help. ALL of the files have been reduced to this. Steam doesn't even recognize them as installed anymore.

[emoticorpse]

Were there any hardware changes or software changes that you made around the time this started happening?

[Zekeram12]

Originally posted by nullable:

Is there any reason why you can't use/get a proper internal SSD?

I use a gaming laptop, so unfortunately I don't quite have the room for modification.

[_I_]

Originally posted by nullable:

This seems like an issue with your PC or the SSD itself. Steam is not doing anything in any particular way, if your hardware has issues, Steam being involved may just be coincidental.

Is there any reason why you can't use/get a proper internal SSD?

steam tries to read/write faster than usb can handle

steam download is
download + write + read + unpack + copy, all at the same time
usb can only do one at a time, not all at once

[MancSoulja]

Originally posted by _I_:

Originally posted by nullable:

This seems like an issue with your PC or the SSD itself. Steam is not doing anything in any particular way, if your hardware has issues, Steam being involved may just be coincidental.

Is there any reason why you can't use/get a proper internal SSD?

steam tries to read/write faster than usb can handle

steam download is
download + write + read + unpack + copy, all at the same time
usb can only do one at a time, not all at once

I have 10TB of games installed on a USB HDD and they all install, update and run perfectly fine.

[🆂🆃🅸🅶🅶🅰]

Originally posted by MancSoulja:

Originally posted by _I_:

steam tries to read/write faster than usb can handle

steam download is
download + write + read + unpack + copy, all at the same time
usb can only do one at a time, not all at once

I have 10TB of games installed on a USB HDD and they all install, update and run perfectly fine.

Well good advice above imo and I tried to install Win10 on an External SSD via a USB to Sata Adapter, but no go.

[Andrius227]

I dont know what kind of external ssd you have, but they can usually be opened and they contain normal drives. You could take it out and swap it with your 1tb ssd, or the 200gb one, although you would need another computer to clone windows.

Installing games on external drives is not a good idea.

[_I_]

to boot from usb it needs to be fat32

[PopinFRESH]

@OP, if it is abruptly dropping the drive where it is causing filesystem damage that would seem to suggest your USB port(s) have insufficient power to keep your external disk powered on. Try to get a powered USB hub and connect your external disk to the powered hub and then see if it still does this. Like MancSoulja I also have an external HDD that I have no issue with installing/updating games directly as normal. Not sure what _|_ is on about with USB throughput or IOPS causing the behavior you're describing. It certainly is slower and does spike CPU load because of the way it downloads and decompresses things but that isn't something that would cause your drive to disconnect like you're describing.

[h_LordEC[no-VC]]

Originally posted by MancSoulja:

Originally posted by _I_:

steam tries to read/write faster than usb can handle

steam download is
download + write + read + unpack + copy, all at the same time
usb can only do one at a time, not all at once

I have 10TB of games installed on a USB HDD and they all install, update and run perfectly fine.

USB2 HDD?
If so, it is because the HDD can't saturate USB2 bandwidth.
Vast majority of SSDs the past 10 years are capable of saturating USB2.
SSDs were part of the reason we moved from SataII to SataIII, to make full use of the SSD's bandwidth.

[PopinFRESH]

Originally posted by h_LordECno-VC:

Originally posted by MancSoulja:

I have 10TB of games installed on a USB HDD and they all install, update and run perfectly fine.

USB2 HDD?
If so, it is because the HDD can't saturate USB2 bandwidth.
Vast majority of SSDs the past 10 years are capable of saturating USB2.
SSDs were part of the reason we moved from SataII to SataIII, to make full use of the SSD's bandwidth.

Still irrelevant to the OP. I also have multiple external USB3 SSDs that will work fine connected via USB2, just much slower than when they are connected to a USB3 port. I don't normally use those for games, however, I just tested adding a steam library on one of them connected to a USB2 port on my desktop and installed Rocket League on it without issue; just slow to finish downloading the extracting.