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?

[Lord Flashheart]

Originally posted by 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.

Not me.
I want all games I may wish to play available to play and updated at ALL TIMES. I am not Not compromising on that.
My multiple games copies, lancache & storing on the NAS allows me to do this.
With deduplication and a low spec windows VM to do the work, then yay.

[Bad 💀 Motha]

Well sure, that's fine if you actively play such games that update frequently. It just perhaps would not make sense to keep a game installed, that also updates frequently, to which you don't play often at all.

[_I_]

yea, games that update like payday, tiny download <100mb with 10+g of file changes can just thrash a drive, it would be faster to delete and re-download the entire game

[Lord Flashheart]

Originally posted by _I_:

yea, games that update like payday, tiny download <100mb with 10+g of file changes can just thrash a drive, it would be faster to delete and re-download the entire game

Maybe for some.
Typically games are updated slowly overnight on the server using a windows virtual machine.
The lancache is populated with recent updates.

Om the gaming machine, well download for steam speeds can be very fast.

Writes due to game updates are over the lan, which is rarely sometimes be a bottleneck.
Due to the nature of deduplication, there are almost no writes to the disk (on the NAS) - as the exact same data is there already.

It seems that steam is the problem to me. Maybe the beta can improve it. I will see with some huge updates.

[_I_]

if you let steam do the update on one pc and copy once its finished, is basically re-writing all the files to the other locations

windows file transfers do not compare or try to compress anything for lan or drive transfers

[Lord Flashheart]

Originally posted by _I_:

if you let steam do the update on one pc and copy once its finished, is basically re-writing all the files to the other locations

windows file transfers do not compare or try to compress anything for lan or drive transfers

It is obvious your understanding of how a NAS operates is not great. I do not care who likes what I am doing.
The transfers use ISCSI, not the awful windows shares.

Now leaving the conversation, as I am not wasting more time on it.

[_I_]

even then, its not just updating the changes within the files, its updating the entire file
its not just sending the 100mb of changes but the 10g of data for the game

[Bad 💀 Motha]

This is why Steam's method is just really dumb. It's always makes your PC do double the work. EA and Uplay never do that.

[VaLiuM]

Originally posted by _I_:

even then, its not just updating the changes within the files, its updating the entire file
its not just sending the 100mb of changes but the 10g of data for the game

That is what's called delta patching on Steam, the few changed bytes or MBs get shipped over small patch files, a very tiny fraction of - for example - a 50 GB game, coming in as a 150 MB update, if most of the game files itself have been changed and only with few bytes, we are talking about 50 GB of data having to be patched and depending on the game, that takes a while.

Temporary storage, actual copies of the game files and later sending them patched files back to their original location.

For a 50 GB game, that requires twice the game size minimum.

Good is, small data transfer over the internet, with slow HDDs, it's a nightmare.

[Bad 💀 Motha]

Originally posted by VaLiuM:

Originally posted by _I_:

even then, its not just updating the changes within the files, its updating the entire file
its not just sending the 100mb of changes but the 10g of data for the game

That is what's called delta patching on Steam, the few changed bytes or MBs get shipped over small patch files, a very tiny fraction of - for example - a 50 GB game, coming in as a 150 MB update, if most of the game files itself have been changed and only with few bytes, we are talking about 50 GB of data having to be patched and depending on the game, that takes a while.

Temporary storage, actual copies of the game files and later sending them patched files back to their original location.

For a 50 GB game, that requires twice the game size minimum.

Good is, small data transfer over the internet, with slow HDDs, it's a nightmare.

It's not.always double the space. It depends how much the original game files on the server side were able to be compressed. Some larger games like GTAV and RDR2 for example the game files are large but are already compressed as-is for those bigger game files that such games include.

For game updates this can be totally different because let's say the pending update is maybe 500MB however it might need multiple GB of free space to apply said update because it may need to copy multiple game files tbat take up a couple GB each so the new updated files can be injected into those game files and repacked and copied back to the actual game folder.

[_I_]

it was many year ago, that steam changed how source files were compressed, and had near 0mb download, but all of the files needed to be decompressed and recompressed and took about an hour on a fast hdd, for hl1, hl2, and episodes 1/2, and portal 1/2 and l4d 1/2, tf 1/2 and cs

[VaLiuM]

Originally posted by Bad 💀 Motha:

It's not.always double the space. It depends how much the original game files on the server side were able to be compressed. Some larger games like GTAV and RDR2 for example the game files are large but are already compressed as-is for those bigger game files that such games include.

I specifically stated a 50 GB game that needs to be patched in whole, of course that would require double the space plus temporary space for patching, so it would need even more.

That this is not the case for every game is pretty much logical and not what i stated.

[Bad 💀 Motha]

Originally posted by VaLiuM:

Originally posted by Bad 💀 Motha:

It's not.always double the space. It depends how much the original game files on the server side were able to be compressed. Some larger games like GTAV and RDR2 for example the game files are large but are already compressed as-is for those bigger game files that such games include.

I specifically stated a 50 GB game that needs to be patched in whole, of course that would require double the space plus temporary space for patching, so it would need even more.

That this is not the case for every game is pretty much logical and not what i stated.

If a patch is that large, just go to the game folder, delete all the game files, then jump back to Steam, go to Properties for said game and click verify. Now it will redownload a fresh copy of the game already patched.

[VaLiuM]

Originally posted by Bad 💀 Motha:

If a patch is that large, just go to the game folder, delete all the game files, then jump back to Steam, go to Properties for said game and click verify. Now it will redownload a fresh copy of the game already patched.

Depending on the game and what needs to be patched, that can be indeed much faster than updating also depending on the internet speed at hand. But simply uninstalling the game from within Steam client (which also removes temporary files iirc) and reinstalling does the same thing, downloading updated game files.

[Bad 💀 Motha]

Well yes in a sense; but some games, like DAYZ for example (I know these are rare) will actually ask you if you'd like to remove logs and save data (user based save data, seperate from game files) during the Steam Uninstall process. And with some games you might lose that extra user data saved locally without warning when doing a game uninstall. So just be helpful and clear, let's best avoid that. If you are not sure, backup any user data first. It can always be thrown back into the correct folder structure after the game is installed. Also this is another rare occurrence (Fallout 4 I'm looking at you) where if a user does a manual Verify of local files from the Steam option; this wipes the user config (which holds the graphics and other settings for the player) without warning. So again, if you dislike this happening to you, find out where all that is stored (usually some where within Users Documents or AppData folders) and make a backup by copying such needed files elsewhere until either the game is reinstalled and/or verified. If you are doing a clean game install, or a large game update, you should keep in mind its always to your benefit, in order to avoid unforeseen issues at game launch or during gameplay to then when either of these methods are completed that you go and do the Verify option to ensure all game files are intact, nothing corrupted and/or missing.

So when I want to do this "just download the whole game already latest patch" on Steam here's what I do. I load up Steam via Run As Admin (as normal) and I see this game update, I click Update and then see once it does the full hand-shake process to preparing downloading, I then see the download is going to be very large (let's say for example, some where quite close to the actual game size if we were to clean install); I pause the update. Then go to here: \Steam\Steamapps > and delete the Downloading and Temp contents (yes while Steam is running, however all downloads are paused); then go to the game folder within Steamapps\Common. Within the game folder for said game, delete all the contents. Don't worry about the actual root game name folder, that would get re-created anyways.

Then in Steam Client > Library, go to that Game Name and go to Properties > Local Files > Verify. Now it will see no game files are present any longer and redownload entire game fresh.

You can pretty much do the same exact method for Games from the EA Games client or Ubisoft Connect game client as well. Verify and Repair do the same thing.

Also, get better with regards to micro-managing Disk Space. As some games for whatever reason, when you click Uninstall from the Game Client, what it does for some games is just delete the app manifest that tells the client the game location and installed or not. And may leave the game files on your drive.