[SOLVED] is it possible that my HDD is slowing down my download speeds?

[ANTFKBA]

So i recently upgraded my internet speed from 100/100 to 1000/1000 but im noticing that when i download games to my HDD my download speed is super inconsistent jumps anywhere from 1MB/s to 90+MB/s and there are many pauses in between where it drops to 0 and nothing happens. But when im downloading to my SSD i seem to have a steady download rate of 90-100MB/s. So i tried downloading a game to my HDD it took me about 30min i then proceeded to uninstall the game and download it to my SSD as a test and that only took me about 5min whats the problem here?

 

[USAFRet]

when i download games to my HDD

How, exactly, are you choosing where these download to?
Downloading from what, with what software?

A properly functioning HDD is faster than your ISP speed.

 

[Math Geek]

a new spinning hdd will maintain about 50 MB/s in my experience.

the GB connection can easily top 100 MB/s, so the hdd is very much going to slow down the process. if you have enough ram, it should buffer there so the download stays moving, but in the end it still has to wait for the hdd to write the files.

as for the starting and stopping and varrying speeds, i see the same thing with my GB connection. seems to be on the other end as i see it no matter what drive i am downloading to. steam, origin and the others all do it to me.

 

[USAFRet]

a new spinning hdd will maintain about 50 MB/s in my experience.

Talking to the HDDs in my NAS, over a regular gigabit house LAN, I can easily see 100 MB/s.
This is to a new 16GB HDD in my NAS.

 

[ANTFKBA]

a new spinning hdd will maintain about 50 MB/s in my experience.

the GB connection can easily top 100 MB/s, so the hdd is very much going to slow down the process. if you have enough ram, it should buffer there so the download stays moving, but in the end it still has to wait for the hdd to write the files.

as for the starting and stopping and varrying speeds, i see the same thing with my GB connection. seems to be on the other end as i see it no matter what drive i am downloading to. steam, origin and the others all do it to me.

but the starting stopping and varying speeds stop when im downloading to my SSD for some reason, like yesterday for example i was downloading a new game to my HDD it was constantly changeing speeds and stopping and the download took lik 30min or something but i then uninstalled the game and downloaded it to my SSD where my speed was basically stuck at 111MB/s and it took me 4min to download the game.

 

[Math Geek]

i believe that is just the system using the hdd speed as best it can and pausing as needed to let the hdd catch up.

 

[Bob.B]

but the starting stopping and varying speeds stop when im downloading to my SSD for some reason, like yesterday for example i was downloading a new game to my HDD it was constantly changeing speeds and stopping and the download took lik 30min or something but i then uninstalled the game and downloaded it to my SSD where my speed was basically stuck at 111MB/s and it took me 4min to download the game.

Look in device manager.
Do you have write caching enabled for the hdd?

 

[hotaru.hino]

So i recently upgraded my internet speed from 100/100 to 1000/1000 but im noticing that when i download games to my HDD my download speed is super inconsistent jumps anywhere from 1MB/s to 90+MB/s and there are many pauses in between where it drops to 0 and nothing happens. But when im downloading to my SSD i seem to have a steady download rate of 90-100MB/s. So i tried downloading a game to my HDD it took me about 30min i then proceeded to uninstall the game and download it to my SSD as a test and that only took me about 5min whats the problem here?

If there's a lot of activity on the hard drive (check Task Manager) while it's downloading, then it's likely that whatever it is you're downloading is doing it in way too many chunks for the hard drive to handle fast enough, which is causing the download speed to suffer. I'm not sure if there's anything you can do about this either, but I don't know too much about networking to see if this is something you can fix. Though I do know is there's a packet size limit and it's kinda small (~64KiB for TCP or UDP)

As an example this was my hard drive activity after downloading a 50MB file