Disk write error on a 4TB HD

[steve7233]

Steam keeps saying DISK WRITE ERROR, on my 4TB HD. Steam wrote about 2 TB to it when I was using 18.04 and 18.10. I upgraded to 19.04 last night. Are there any known issues with Kubuntu 19.04 that could be causing this? The drive is a Western Digital My Book. I use it's USB 3 port with my computers USB 3.1 port and the USB 3 cable that came with it. It was a recent purchase. It has a 3-year warranty if you think it's the drive. I reformatted it with full BTRFS.

Edit: I forgot to add I did a fresh install of 19.04. I did not reformat this drive. I just added it so I could point steam to the steam library on it, so I kept my games.

[jlittle]

Free space on a btrfs can be confusing; maybe the drive thinks it's full. What does btrfs filesystem usage say? If the drive is mounted on /mnt/steam, the command would be sudo btrfs filesystem usage /mnt/steam.

[steve7233]

Free space on a btrfs can be confusing; maybe the drive thinks it's full. What does btrfs filesystem usage say? If the drive is mounted on /mnt/steam, the command would be sudo btrfs filesystem usage /mnt/steam.

steve7233@steve7233-Z68XP-UD3:~$ sudo btrfs filesystem usage /steam
Overall:
  Device size:                   3.64TiB
  Device allocated:              1.12TiB
  Device unallocated:            2.52TiB
  Device missing:                  0.00B
  Used:                          1.11TiB
  Free (estimated):              2.52TiB      (min: 1.26TiB)
  Data ratio:                       1.00
  Metadata ratio:                   2.00
  Global reserve:              512.00MiB      (used: 0.00B)

Data,single: Size:1.11TiB, Used:1.11TiB
 /dev/sdc1       1.11TiB

Metadata,DUP: Size:4.00GiB, Used:2.22GiB
 /dev/sdc1       8.00GiB

System,DUP: Size:8.00MiB, Used:144.00KiB
 /dev/sdc1      16.00MiB

Unallocated:
 /dev/sdc1       2.52TiB

That's strange Dolphin says 2.5 TiB free.

[jlittle]

Nothing to see, I think, except that there's only about 1 TB on it.

[steve7233]

Its a 4 Terra byte HD and Dolphin says 2.5 TiB free.

[steve7233]

I suspect it might be because BTRFS is a partition less file system. Maybe steam is misinterpreting it. Perhaps it's like the old days when HDs first got what back then was considered huge. They used LBAs or Large Block Areas to address larger capacities. Maybe something like that is needed.

[steve7233]

I have downloaded several more games since my last post and they didn't have a problem with the drive. Dolphin now says there is 2.4 TiB free. Tropico 6 keeps getting a DISK WRITE ERROR. Which very weird because there is plenty of free space and no other game that I tried to added has a problem. Any body have any idea what might be going on with this one game that is different from all the other games?

[Snowhog]

It could be possible the installer is, at some point, trying to write to a directory that doesn't exist. Does the program include a readable installation script? If it does, you can review it for all path locations it includes and verify that they all exist on your system. Just a thought.

[jlittle]

I know next to nothing about steam.

However, a search found a post on "partition wizard" and the item about tracing the error in the steam logs might fit your problem.

Sent from my Vodafone Smart ultra 6 using Tapatalk

[steve7233]

It could be possible the installer is, at some point, trying to write to a directory that doesn't exist. Does the program include a readable installation script? If it does, you can review it for all path locations it includes and verify that they all exist on your system. Just a thought.

It finally worked sort of. It doesn't display correctly in full screen and even in windows full window mode it's just a little off with the Graphical controls so your directory theory might be a good place to look. I hadn't considered that. It does sound like a good possibility. It's possible that Paradox Interactive might made an mistake in the installer. The game is made - Tropico 6 -, by Lymbic Entertainment, but overseen by the copyright holder witch is Kalypso Media.

[steve7233]

Great another game that causes a steam false disk write error. Syberia 3. I have 2.4 terabytes free. Maybe something about the way BTRFS works? Probably Valve/Steam needs to update its technology. I never did figure out why the last game had problems. One day it decided to work. Maybe I wait a few weeks and this game will work to like the other one sudden worked. Weird behavior but that's what the last game did.

[steve7233]

Could Steam be thinking the BTRFS drive is a thumb drive? It is an external USB 3 drive. I understand if you have a 16 Gig a byte thumb drive but the file is -I think- larger than 4 gigabytes then that will cause a disk write error due to only being able to write up a 4 gig file size at a time. Maybe it's a USB thing?

[oshunluvr]

What are your mount options? Type "mount" in a terminal and paste the output of the btrfs mount.

[oshunluvr]

I did a little research. It seems some Steam developers do not correctly configure Large File Support (LFS) when developing their games in 32-bit. I found cases where XFS was causing the same problem when used on a file system larger than 1.5TB. From Reddit:

It's a long-known known issue, but only on 32-bit programs that don't handle 64-bit inodes, and not with ext4, so not typically encountered.
If gamedevs support only 64-bit they can ignore it altogether. Steam Hardware Survey shows that 100.0% of Linux users surveyed are on 64-bit operating systems.

So it seems that your problem could be rooted in the simple fact that the games that don't work were written/compiled as 32-bit rather than 64-bit.

[steve7233]

I did a little research. It seems some Steam developers do not correctly configure Large File Support (LFS) when developing their games in 32-bit. I found cases where XFS was causing the same problem when used on a file system larger than 1.5TB. From Reddit:

So it seems that your problem could be rooted in the simple fact that the games that don't work were written/compiled as 32-bit rather than 64-bit.

I am a member of Reddit. Where is that information. I would like to read it. I hope there is a work around for this.