Forum Discussion
Steam download speed keeps dropping to zero
Trying to download a game on Steam right now, but the download speed is all over the place. My internet is fast—should be getting well over 50MB/s—but Steam keeps dropping to zero and slowly creeping back up. It's been doing this on and off for hours and I can't figure out why.
I've already checked my connection and it's fine on other devices. Anyone know what might be causing this or how to fix it?
3 Replies
When you download a game on Steam, it's a two-part process: the data is downloaded, and then it's decompressed and written to your drive. If your drive writes data too slowly, Steam will halt the download to prevent data loss and wait for the disk to catch up. This is why you see the network speed drop to zero while the disk usage stays high.
If your disk can't keep up, the download will pause to let it catch up, causing the speed to drop to zero.
Open Task Manager (Ctrl+Shift+Esc) and watch the Performance tab while Steam is downloading.
If your Disk (the one Steam installs to) is pinned at or near 100% right when the speed drops to zero, the download isn't network-limited — Steam is waiting on your drive to finish writing/unpacking files before it requests more data. This is the single most common cause of this exact pattern.
