How to fix Intel 660P 2TB cache scheduling in Atomic Heart?
I was finally loving the fast loads in that retro-future world, but the honeymoon lasted ten minutes before the game started crashing during auto-saves. The logs showed that once the Intel 660P 2TB's dynamic SLC cache was full, write speeds plummeted from 3000MB/s to under 600MB/s, triggering an I/O timeout. My first instinct was to run a disk defrag to clear space, but that's useless on an NVMe and just adds wear—total fail on my part. I then went into Device Manager, bumped the NVMe queue depth from 1024 to 2048, and killed the drive sleep mode in power management. CrystalDiskMark showed 4K random writes improving from 30-40MB/s to 50-62MB/s, and the crashes stopped. I did hit a snag where the system had a slight recognition lag at idle after the tweak, but switching to the High Performance power plan fixed it. The drive is idling at 40-46℃. Saved the cache strategy into a BIOS preset; the storage parameters are switched over.
