hi, why reserving space takes so long? is it on purpose?

[DrDred]

hi, why reserving space takes so long? no other games store do this so slowly!
???
STEAM PLEASE ANSWER
i looks like you done it on purpose, against best interest of your consumers.

In my opinion some government bodies should look at that! Its anti consumer!

[Nx Machina]

Games over time have gotten larger and in turn the time it takes to allocate space but depends on the actual game been downloaded.

Allocating reserves the space to install the game to.

If a game is 30gb when installed you need 60gb space available to allow it to download, unpack files etc.

Defragging your hdd can help.

As for government intervention you are way off the mark. An install process cannot even be defined as anti consumer because it it a process needing to happen for you to play the game.

[Nx Machina]

It is how Steam works.

I do not have allocation problems and all my games are installed on hdd.

[Start_Running]

Its not supposed to take very long. A common culprit is the AV/Firewall Apps.

[Mat3usz]

-

[sssss]

fgf

[Momoi]

nice

[Tharon]

Wrong implementation.

Reserve space on the hard drive is instantaneous, you can try it by yourself using this command :

fsutil file createnew testsize 10000000000

It will create a zeroed file of 10 gb in a fraction of a second. Why then Steam takes so long then ? Because instead of let Windows reserve the space, Steam build the files itself, writing zeroes in the disk. And this will take a great amount of time.

[Start_Running]

Originally posted by Tharon:

Wrong implementation.

Reserve space on the hard drive is instantaneous, you can try it by yourself using this command :

fsutil file createnew testsize 10000000000

It will create a zeroed file of 10 gb in a fraction of a second. Why then Steam takes so long then ? Because instead of let Windows reserve the space, Steam build the files itself, writing zeroes in the disk. And this will take a great amount of time.

Exceopt that under most circumstances STeams method works in the same time scale....

[Tharon]

Originally posted by Start_Running:

Originally posted by Tharon:

Wrong implementation.

Reserve space on the hard drive is instantaneous, you can try it by yourself using this command :

fsutil file createnew testsize 10000000000

It will create a zeroed file of 10 gb in a fraction of a second. Why then Steam takes so long then ? Because instead of let Windows reserve the space, Steam build the files itself, writing zeroes in the disk. And this will take a great amount of time.

Exceopt that under most circumstances STeams method works in the same time scale....

On a Tardis maybe.

[Start_Running]

Originally posted by Tharon:

Originally posted by Start_Running:

Exceopt that under most circumstances STeams method works in the same time scale....

On a Tardis maybe.

Well. I dunno bout a tardis but my 12 year old desktop doesn't even have a noticable preallocation on anything below 10 gigs and for above that its just long enough for you to read the word preallocating in the dialog.

[Tharon]

It's widely inconsistent. Some games preallocate quick, other take ages. Just tried with a bunch of games.

[Start_Running]

Originally posted by Tharon:

It's widely inconsistent. Some games preallocate quick, other take ages. Just tried with a bunch of games.

It may be boiling down to how the installers are setuup by the devs....
This is why its a tricky problem for Valve to solve.

[Kaldaien]

No other game stores do this, and as a result other game stores suffer from fragmentation issues :-\

[Tharon]

Steam suffer from fragmentation issues too.

[Kaldaien]

Not on a base game install, this is the entire purpose of pre-allocating the storage and then moving the downloaded data into the place of the pre-allocation later. Reserving the disk space would lead to fragmentation, actually allocating and filling the disk space solves that problem.