I believe I've found what the problem is. If you check azvampyre's 3rd comment here they give the url where the file they couldn't download was stored. There in the download code there is a 300 second expiration. So, that could be the time allotted by github for certain file downloads. This explains why I always finish the download in 5 minutes whether it's 1.1 1.2 or 1.3 GB.

The solution according to azvampyre was to change this number to 999999 and re-download. However, I am not sure how to get this detailed url for the download. Is there a tool that tracks it or let's you see the whole url from the storage space?