How fast is my disk usage supposed to be
Watching my Starfield download unpack in Steam, I suddenly wonder why it's not as fast as the specifications on my disk say.
I have a Kingston A2000 1 TB in the M2 slot on my motherboard. That card specifies a maximum read speed of 2200 MB/s and a maximum write speed of 2000 MB/s. (and yes, MB, not Mb, so bytes, not bits).
But the unpack in Steam never gets any faster than about 200 MB/s. Looking at my disk performance in Task Manager confirms this.
Is this to be expected? Or do I have something configured wrong somewhere and is my disk not being used to its full potential?
Posted Sep 1, 2023, 4:00 PM UTC
19
Meanwhile your CPU is at like 85% right?
yeah. pretty constantly
Want a long explainer or short?
Steam downloads compressed data, your CPU is working to unpack it.
A long explainer is nice too, thanks :)
Your internet connection is always going to be the bottleneck (for average users). So, to actually speed things up steam make use of compression on download files.
So very much like how making a .zip file works, you spend some time now to compress the data, for the tradeoff of having to uncompress it to then use it.
So it's effectively doing multiple download calls and uncompressing this data, running verification of it and then onto the next bit of data.
Your SSD will always be an order of magnitude faster than what your internet connection is, so this makes sense for home users.