How to fix WD SN850 read latency in A Plague Tale Requiem?
The game is visually stunning, but having the frame rate tank from 80 FPS to 30 FPS the moment the rat swarms appear is a total mood killer. My 1TB WD SN850 was over 85% full, and the garbage collection mechanism was kicking in, causing random read latency to jump from 0.05ms to 0.2ms. This led to severe hitching whenever the game loaded a new zone. I tried running a defrag, which was a huge mistake—it did nothing and just added unnecessary wear to the drive. I eventually used a professional tool to recalibrate the 4K partition alignment and enabled High Performance write mode in the driver. In 3DMark storage stress tests, random reads improved from 45MB/s to 62-68MB/s, and the stuttering stopped. I did find that some older apps booted slightly slower after the alignment change, but switching the power plan to 'High Performance' sorted that out. Temps are holding at 48-55℃ with very little fluctuation. The bandwidth is finally maxed out, and it's stable at 48-55℃.
