Often when downloading a game on steam my nvme drive gets pinned at 100% IO usage and my whole DE (gnome) can lock up at times. Is there a way to limit it so that this never happens?
this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2026
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Did you check memory usage at the same time? Install would certainly be IO intensive but probably shouldn't max out a decent nvme drive.
If you ran out of ram due to the games installer and you started swapping that could quickly max out IO and DEs tend to stall quickly when the system is short on ram which also matches your symptoms.