How to reduce read latency on the Seagate FireCuda 530 1TB?
Entering the main city was a joke; the loading bar moved like a snail, which is just unacceptable in 2026. The Seagate FireCuda 530 1TB has a default 4K random read of 55MB/s - 62MB/s, but when hitting fragmented textures, latency stretched to 22ms - 35ms. I tried enabling Fast Startup in Windows, but that did absolutely nothing, which just made me want to try something more aggressive. I reformatted the partition and forced the allocation unit size from 4KB to 64KB, then enabled NTFS compression. In CrystalDiskMark, random read performance jumped by about 18%, and city load times dropped from 15 seconds to 9 seconds. I hit a wall the first time when it said 'insufficient space' during the format, but clearing 200GB of junk fixed it. Temps are steady at 48℃ - 54℃ with a very clean read/write curve. I switched all partition attributes via Disk Management, and it finally feels right.
