How's it possible that my download speed is greater than the speed of disk writing?

Funadddelic

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Dec 10, 2014
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Alright, so, Im currently downloading an update for a game on Steam and under ''Network usage'' it says that my speed is 610kbps, and right below that it says that my ''Disk usage'' is 2,1 mb/s, so this is my question. What if I had an internet connection like my friends do, which is 50Mbps, so that would mean that my download speed would be around 6,2 mbps, but if my download speed would be around 6,2 mbps and disk can only write at the speed of 2,1 mb/s, how would that even be possible, to download faster than my HDD can actually write it on the disk? Where would the downloaded data stay before it was written down on the HDD?
 
Solution
System RAM. If your system as 4GB (gigabyte) of RAM, that's actually 32Gb (gigabit) or 32,768 Mb (megabits) of RAM. Typically, that's more than enough space for downloads.

-Wolf sends