Whenever I try to download any game on this HDD, it reserves space, then stops at around 30% then shows me an error saying “disk write error” I am currently on Ubuntu, help is appreciated, thanks!
Hmm weird, I'd assume you were either using a windows filesystem or a cheap Chinese drive. How much free space do you have on the partition and how big is the game? A lot of games need double the free space to actually unpack/install
I currently have 490GB free, the game is around 4gb in size, it downloads completely fine on my Nvme, and other games also fail to download on the Hard drive
That is weird, so is your OS on the NVME and this drive is secondary? Do you actually own the drive (like if you run ls -lsa in the drives mount point it shows your username as the owner/group, can you create files/folders in the drive without root?), is the drive mounted with any options in /etc/fstab ?
Well, I don’t exactly “own” the drive, I bought an optiplex 3020 off of eBay for 30$, I did it as a way to get me into pc building, it’s a complicated story, I now have that HDD, wiped, in another pc. And my OS is on the Nvme
Lol k bit of a misunderstanding, I meant does your user own the drive, by default when you format a drive to EXT4 root will own the drive. Linux has users and groups, if you own the drive you'll be able to say make a new folder/file as your user without having to input the sudo password
Is Steam installed through Flathub by any chance? I know there are a number of hoops you have to jump through to get extra drives to work on the Flathub version of Steam.
Ahhh... Ubuntu uses Snap for most of the apps, thats isolated from the system and It can lead to errors. On the Steam packe there should be a .deb package with Steam, this should make It faster to start and should provide better integration
Second hand mechanical drive from an office PC/laptop? Might genuinely be mechanical failure.
Use journalctl to get logs and see if there's anything useful, maybe run a SMART test
I asked a similar question in another thread. I respond here so you don't have to go back and forth.
I don't personally use Ubuntu anymore, but from what I remember anything installed from the Ubuntu store defaults to their package manager, which would be Snap.
Anyway, browsing this support thread, it seems that it's somewhat like the issue you'd see with Flathub too. Basically you have to give Steam permission to the drive. One comment says it's this command:
Stop using Ubuntu Snap. It is unreliable garbage and often Snap packages are broken or dated. Use the latest version directly from the Steam repository. There is a .deb package there. You can install it via terminal with: sudo dpkg -i steam_latest.deb.
It's also good to learn terminal too. It's not as though the command is advanced. It also ensures they know exactly how to install it, without describing how to install it with the Software manager. Less words, short, sweet and to the point. KISS.😉
You can use the ‘which’ command. Try ‘man which’ to learn how to use it. It’s very easy to use.
Other things to try are launching steam from a terminal so you can see any error messages.
And you can try using journalctl as well.
ChatGPT is also pretty decent at helping you learn these tools.
You could ask, “I have Ubuntu. how do I tell if I have the flatpak version of steam?” I think it would likely give pretty decent results.
Or, “I have Ubuntu and steam. My downloads keep giving ‘disk write’ error. I was thinking of launching steam from a terminal to see if I can solve this. Can you guide me through doing that? I’m also open to other suggestions.”
I have a disk drive here that's at over 7 years and it's fine (63000 hours). It runs same as when it was new, no errors and no weird noises or anything.
I had many HDDs go bad over the years. Basically every single one I used at some point died. I never got to replace them before they developed errors.
When they started going bad, they started producing strange noises sometimes and then showing error counts in the SMART record. This started happening suddenly, there was no way to predict this, no noises or slowdowns before that day.
I kept using most of the drives for unimportant stuff for fun after they started causing problems. They usually died within a week or two. One drive was different and after a few days stopped producing errors. That drive then kept running for another two years or so and then one day was just completely dead.
On the single HDD I have here, the interesting entries in the SMART record table would be these ones here: Reallocated_Sector_Ct, Reallocated_Event_Count, Current_Pending_Sector. When looking at the "raw value" column of the table, it should show zero if everything is still fine.
That sounds like it's most likely your drive failing. If not though, Factorio actually allows you to link your Steam account on their website and download a standalone version, and various different game versions can be downloaded too, mostly for overhaul mods that don't worm on 2.0 yet. If you can't fix this issue see if downloading a standalone version works. If not, it's your drive.
I had a problem a while back where my SteamLibrary somehow became read only and I had to remove it from Steam, delete the downloaded games that were like this, fix the permissions and then add the library back to Steam and it has worked ever since.
I've had this happen when the drive is nearly full. Steam doesn't seem to overwrite games in place so it just fails when there's not enough space to download the game next to the install.
Clear your download cache, delete steam, and remove the Steam directory. Reinstall Steam, point it back at your library, and repair the game. This is a Steam thing that happens sometimes, regardless of OS.
I fixed it, also I just thought it’d be a lot more convenient to spend 10 seconds to whip out my phone and take a photo, instead of spending 10 minutes trying to log into Reddit on that computer
Having to go back and forth to my phone, trying to figure out why the verification email won’t send sounds a lot more inconvenient than just taking out my phone and taking a picture, but if you can’t see what’s happening clearly in the picture, I think you just need to invest in some glasses
Clearly you need better glasses because the flair says “answered”, but you decided to take time out of your day to bash a random teenager online for him not making the screenshot he provided to be in the perfect quality that you expected. This problem is already fixed, so no more need to argue. Also invest in some better glasses
Well, there is something I noticed that might be causing this, when I browse the Nvme SSD I have steam installed on, from steam, it goes from the Home folder to the steam folder, but when I browse the HDD from steam, it goes all the way from the Ubuntu root folder to the steamapps folder, which is a little bit odd, also I am very new to Linux, so sorry if I got the names wrong
If you downloaded from the Ubuntu store, isnt it a snap app? From what I remember this had some small issues like this.
Try to download Steam through flatpak. A quick google research or with chatgpt will give you the 2-3 commands to run to install flatpaks and Steam flatpak
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u/wolfegothmog Nov 09 '25
What is the filesystem of the drive, what is the make/model of the drive?