Slow SSD write speed during Steam Download

[RealNearDead]

Hi all,

I'm having continuous issues with slow write speed slowing down all my steam download / installs.

I've followed some recommendations on here and disabled write caching for the drive along with some other recommendations I've found on here, but nothing seems to help.

I have a SSD which I've tested the read / write speed on through a couple programs and it works perfectly. (3 - 5 GBs/sec). So I know that's not the problem.

Additionally, I just bought a new system with 16 GB DDR5 RAM and a faster processor (Intel i5-14400F). It's running Windows 11, as I'd read many of these bottleneck issues had to do with various Windows 10 things (power button settings and such).

I've tried to delete all the bloatware on this new system.

During the download my task manager is only reading 1 - 5% HDD usage. I've also been able to clarify that my system is opening the entirety of my download speed (it was 85 MB/sec last time I was downloading something) to Steam, but Steam only showed 12 MB/sec on the download monitor and it never went above that, but did fluctuate down to 8 MB/sec at times.

Any recommendations or ideas for me to look into?

[Bad 💀 Motha]

It's only going to write about as fast as your download speed

[RealNearDead]

Yes and my download speed is almost 8x what the write speed is reading.

Further I was able to check my network and it allowed the full speed to Steam. Nothing else was using the network at the time.

Further this is a problem ONLY with Steam, no other downloader does this.

[A&A]

Is it running Windows 11 Pro?

[RealNearDead]

Originally posted by A&A:

Is it running Windows 11 Pro?

Nope just 11 Home.

[Bad 💀 Motha]

Originally posted by RealNearDead:

Yes and my download speed is almost 8x what the write speed is reading.

Further I was able to check my network and it allowed the full speed to Steam. Nothing else was using the network at the time.

Further this is a problem ONLY with Steam, no other downloader does this.

Try a different server. It's in the Steam settings. Many to choose from. Most of them, especially in Europe / Asia will be slower then normal as so many are all downloading alot of games during a big sale like this.

[RealNearDead]

Originally posted by Bad 💀 Motha:

Originally posted by RealNearDead:

Yes and my download speed is almost 8x what the write speed is reading.

Further I was able to check my network and it allowed the full speed to Steam. Nothing else was using the network at the time.

Further this is a problem ONLY with Steam, no other downloader does this.

Try a different server. It's in the Steam settings. Many to choose from. Most of them, especially in Europe / Asia will be slower then normal as so many are all downloading alot of games during a big sale like this.

I have tried well over 7 server locations.

Again this has nothing to do with my download bandwidth. Steam downloads are limited by the read/write speed of the disk drive, not the available bandwidth. It has to do with how Steam servers are packing the files.

I am trying to discover if there is a known bottleneck in this regard.

As an example, in Windows 10 this was often bottlenecked by the Fast-boot option in the system. Why did this affect it? As far as I can tell no one really knows, but it absolutely did.

I'm looking to see if anyone has noticed any such new things in Windows 11 as I'm newer to the OS for gaming.

[Bad 💀 Motha]

It's all on your end bro.

I get 50-60 MB/s on Steam all day long.

Even on the "crappy" 10 year old PC.

[Lord Flashheart]

Originally posted by RealNearDead:

Hi all,

I'm having continuous issues with slow write speed slowing down all my steam download / installs.

I've followed some recommendations on here and disabled write caching for the drive along with some other recommendations I've found on here, but nothing seems to help.

I have a SSD which I've tested the read / write speed on through a couple programs and it works perfectly. (3 - 5 GBs/sec). So I know that's not the problem.

Additionally, I just bought a new system with 16 GB DDR5 RAM and a faster processor (Intel i5-14400F). It's running Windows 11, as I'd read many of these bottleneck issues had to do with various Windows 10 things (power button settings and such).

I've tried to delete all the bloatware on this new system.

During the download my task manager is only reading 1 - 5% HDD usage. I've also been able to clarify that my system is opening the entirety of my download speed (it was 85 MB/sec last time I was downloading something) to Steam, but Steam only showed 12 MB/sec on the download monitor and it never went above that, but did fluctuate down to 8 MB/sec at times.

Any recommendations or ideas for me to look into?

It is apparently steam that is the problem.

I expect there is a lot of reads/writes during the process. I guess a lot of random 4k which drag down the speeds.

Also check if steam has its download speed capped - in steam.

There is also the possibility your ISP is up to something.

[Bad 💀 Motha]

You using Steam Beta? Please do.
No it's not Steam.
It's on your end, it's the servers you picking, or your Steam Settings.

By default it shows the Download Speeds in MB/s; not Mbps

ISP rated Mbps speed > divide by 8 = MB/s

Drive Speeds are always showed in MB/s

Also if you have multiple Steam Library Folder configured in Steam; it might be downloading to a different drive. Check the Storage Settings in Steam for that.

[C1REX]

There are two read and write speeds for ssd.

Advertised sequential r/w speed and a much slower and also much more important for most people random access speed - read and write of multiple tiny files instead of a single 100GB video file.

The more important speed is multiple times slower than the advertised one and often hard to find unless people done some benchmarks.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16012/the-sk-hynix-gold-p31-ssd-review/6

Some ssd may be worse than others even if advertised speed is decent.

[Bad 💀 Motha]

Yes sequential is the speed you think of as the highe4 speed because of specs marketing. However with game installs you'd always be having random writes and reads not sequential since we don't do needless old-school Disk Defragging; where you actually rewrite the data and files in order, all that would do is shortening your SDD life span.

So go do a benchmark of your drives using CrystalDiskMark with a 1GB or larger test file. Whatever ot says for Random 4K reads and writes, that's basically all your SSD does for the most part. How do you increase this you might ask? By not using 4K clusters, which if you are letting WinOS partition and format your drives, 4K sectors/cluster are the default, however for some drives (hdd and ssd) this can very easily slow your drive down. If you partition the drives all yourself you can set them to 8K, 16K, 32K sizes. Mine are all set to 16K and it drastically helps the random speeds. The down side is if your drive has a ton of very tiny files on it, those files will take up a larger minimum size by default due to the higher cluster size of say 16K vs 4K

Avoid DRAM-less SSDs in a Pro Work or Gaming PC. If you must buy those, use those for external backup needs or to store smaller files.

[_I_]

and it also may be limited by core performance while its doing the read -> decompress -> write processes

[Lord Flashheart]

Originally posted by Bad 💀 Motha:

You using Steam Beta? Please do.
No it's not Steam.
It's on your end, it's the servers you picking, or your Steam Settings.

By default it shows the Download Speeds in MB/s; not Mbps

ISP rated Mbps speed > divide by 8 = MB/s

Drive Speeds are always showed in MB/s

Also if you have multiple Steam Library Folder configured in Steam; it might be downloading to a different drive. Check the Storage Settings in Steam for that.

I will try the beta anyway.

My games are on truenas, specifically ISCSI.
A 1/2 TB local nvme with primocache software.
It works well.
Some games can be slow to update, if not cached. That does not concern me a lot.
When updating games, the data is nearly always on the lancache anyway. The bottleneck is 2.5Gb network.

Games reads/writes in steam (to ISCSI disk) ) can tank sometimes at 10Mb/s. Typically 100MB/s +. I suspect that is due to steam.


I wonder why using only a local SSD for games, it is so slow for the OP.

[Lord Flashheart]

Originally posted by _I_:

and it also may be limited by core performance while its doing the read -> decompress -> write processes

Some game updates can be odd, with maybe 5GB of download, but maybe 50GB or I/O. It depends on the game. That will fill any SLC cache easily, and the NVMe write speed could be dismal I could be worse than hard drive performance. So read, decompress, then lots and lots of reads & writes overwhelming the SSD.

[Bad 💀 Motha]

If you have a game that has large updates often enough; it might be quicker to just go and delete the entire game off your drive, then do verify and let it redownload the entire game. As some updates can be really lengthy because it has to first copy over the game files, inject the updated files that go inside those files, then copy them back over to where they are supposed to reside.

Games like CSGO, TF2, PAYDAY2, Dead By Daylight; used to do this alot back in the day (and yes I had all SSDs) and it was painfully slow to update such games. But since my ISP was around 250Mbps or more; downloading the entire game was actually quicker; which would include the updates.