Whenever I download anything with Brave be it a small file or a large file, the browser freezes (partially or fully, nothing below address bar renders, weirdly youtube keeps playing), the download bar on task bar is stuck (sometimes at the beginning, sometimes later, depends on number of files). It also causes the HDD to which I’m downloading to hang up for a minute or longer, even outside of Brave (during which Total Commander cannot even open the drive and claims it’s not found).
I fully admit this secondary HDD is ancient (12 years) but it’s functional (Crrystal Disk Info, HDD Inspector, Hard Drive Sentinel give it all 98% to 100% and that’s only beacause of it’s age, less than a year of operating), there are no checkdisc errors, bad sectors, the universla Seagete disk chacker retursn no problems. The HDD was deep formated recently also. I have probed the HDD with copying multiple large files (few hunderd megs to few GB, sometimes simultaneously) and small ones (few hundred to tens of thousands of small ones, 10-200kb range), nothing happens at all, ever.
I have downloaded the same files (multiple times) using Firefox (same download directory) and nothing happens, so it’s not stricty hardware related.
Another interesting quirk of this problem is that I can trigger the problem myself on at least one page reliably, namely I can go to Instagram (any profile will do), use ane extension that downloads the pictures from the account and then it’s gets interesting. Some times it works ok, but very often the Download page will have all files marked “Retry”. If I click one Retry, it downloads instantly with no problems. If however I click another one or if I click multiple ones it hangs the browser AND the hard drive almost instantly. I can also un-hang it, reliably too, by canceling the downloads and waiting a bit.
This is all tested with and without any other extensions.
I have a theory regarding this. Somewhere on the intersection of old HDD, Win 7, my ISP and Brave it causes the drive to be overloaded with data (I’m on 300mbit fiber). Pehaps it’s the parallel downloads or how Chromium or Brave handles the data being downloaded. Or perhaps it has something to do with how Brave handles temporary files that are later turned into the actual files on HDD. Finally, it can also be the isuue of memory-to-HDD data transfer (RAM tested, nothing unusual), meaning Brave handles RAM, RAM hanles downloaded data then moves it to HDD.
This issue is super weird considering otherwise Brave performs flawlessly (crashed maybe 2 times in recent years), is extremely fast (noticeably faster than FF) and has no slowdowns or hickups whatsoever even under heaviest loads (rendering, handling large 50mb clipboard pastes, java etc. all ath the same time).
