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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you can try changing your io scheduler: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Improving_performance#Input/output_schedulers
i think by default ssd and nvme drives get 'none' as they should be fast enough to just take first come first serve and get everything done, however in certain cases like this you can get bogged down by a single thing hogging the drive for a long time. i'd recommend 'kyber', it'll treat io requests similar to network requests and give requests tokens that ensure everything requesting io gets the io within reasonably responsive timeframes. note: this will slow your single task read/write speed, but only a tiny bit and it's worth it for other things being able to use disk while it's being hogged like on a game update.