Sounds like you need a new harddrive

No, it happens on all hard drives."

Originally posted by Pé Tay TO:

Hello everyone, could you please help me? When I download games on Steam, my hard drive barely runs — most of the time, it seems like it's not working at all. I hope someone can explain and help me. Thank you very much!

Hey, I got you! This is actually a super common thing on Steam, especially with newer updates.

When you download games, Steam doesn’t just write files directly to your hard drive. It does a few things in the background:

1. It downloads compressed chunks.
2. It unpacks and verifies those chunks before writing them.

So sometimes your download speed looks fine, but your hard drive seems idle — because Steam is sitting there checking or unpacking stuff in RAM or cache before actually writing it down.

✅ Why it happens:
- If your hard drive is an HDD (not SSD), unpacking takes longer, and Steam “pauses” writing while it processes.
- If your CPU or RAM is maxed out, that can slow things down too — Steam needs both for unpacking.

✅ What you can do:
1. Check task manager while downloading.
- Look at Disk, CPU, and RAM usage.
- You’ll probably see CPU or RAM going up while disk usage is low — that’s normal behavior.
2. Make sure Steam is installed on the fastest drive you have.
- SSD > HDD for Steam downloads these days.
- If you can, move Steam’s library to SSD.
3. Disable other apps running in the background.
- Close browsers, Discord, whatever else eats CPU/RAM while downloading.
4. Change Steam’s download settings:
- Go to Steam > Settings > Downloads
- Try turning off “Throttle downloads while streaming” and clear download cache.

🎙️ Bottom line:
Your hard drive is probably fine — it’s just Steam’s download system doing its thing. No need to worry unless it completely freezes or throws disk errors.

thank broo so much but my hard driver i SSD

Originally posted by Nes:

Originally posted by Pé Tay TO:

Hello everyone, could you please help me? When I download games on Steam, my hard drive barely runs — most of the time, it seems like it's not working at all. I hope someone can explain and help me. Thank you very much!

Hey, I got you! This is actually a super common thing on Steam, especially with newer updates.

When you download games, Steam doesn’t just write files directly to your hard drive. It does a few things in the background:

1. It downloads compressed chunks.
2. It unpacks and verifies those chunks before writing them.

So sometimes your download speed looks fine, but your hard drive seems idle — because Steam is sitting there checking or unpacking stuff in RAM or cache before actually writing it down.

✅ Why it happens:
- If your hard drive is an HDD (not SSD), unpacking takes longer, and Steam “pauses” writing while it processes.
- If your CPU or RAM is maxed out, that can slow things down too — Steam needs both for unpacking.

✅ What you can do:
1. Check task manager while downloading.
- Look at Disk, CPU, and RAM usage.
- You’ll probably see CPU or RAM going up while disk usage is low — that’s normal behavior.
2. Make sure Steam is installed on the fastest drive you have.
- SSD > HDD for Steam downloads these days.
- If you can, move Steam’s library to SSD.
3. Disable other apps running in the background.
- Close browsers, Discord, whatever else eats CPU/RAM while downloading.
4. Change Steam’s download settings:
- Go to Steam > Settings > Downloads
- Try turning off “Throttle downloads while streaming” and clear download cache.

🎙️ Bottom line:
Your hard drive is probably fine — it’s just Steam’s download system doing its thing. No need to worry unless it completely freezes or throws disk errors.

LLM slop...