Erratic Steam Download Speeds in Windows

Here’s what a Steam download looks like in Windows on my main gaming rig:

Notice the wildly varying download speeds. There’s not much on my network besides me…no kids streaming BTS or anything, or watching 4K Prime videos. Any thoughts on what might be causing this erratic performance?

Note that under Linux everything works like a champ…of course. But I still need to keep Winblows around for the occasional piece of software that Linux can’t yet run.

Is this common problem or occurring only every now and then? When this happens do you notice any other online stuff slowing down, like Youtube buffering more or websites just downloading slower than usual?

Do you have any other gaming related clients like Origin, Blizzard’s Battle Net, Epic, Gog Galaxy or similar that start in the background during Windows startup? For me the erratic download speeds in Steam are almost always caused by some other program, or even Windows itself, downloading some big patches or other downloads. And it’s sometimes annoying to try to hunt down what might be sucking the bandwidth from Steam.

What is your storage setup like? I see disk utilization is spiking and then the network is resuming? Have you looked at Task Manager/Resource Monitor? Back when I had spinning rust this would happen while the disk was trying to keep up with the download speeds.

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Thanks, guys. Windows is currently on a el cheapo SSD (Team Group I think) that I’ve been suspicious of for a while. I guess I’ll just have to pony up for a Samsung or Crucial 2.5" SSD and hope that fixes the problem. If not, I’ll have to revisit my Windows install. Might be time to ‘refresh’ Windows with a nuke-and-pave.

Yeah steam does this for me too, especially for older games, like Star Wars: Empire at War. I think they throttle some less popular games client side.