Optimizing space and speed for Seagate FireCuda 530 500GB
When the loading bar for the title screen just sat at 99% for ten straight seconds, I knew my 500GB drive was choking. It was actually kind of exciting to see how far I could push the optimization. On the FireCuda 530, once free space drops below 100GB, the garbage collection kicks in constantly, and random reads tank from 70MB/s down to 35-42MB/s. I tried deleting a few unused apps, but clearing 20GB did basically nothing—that kind of cleanup is just a drop in the bucket. I ended up manually triggering a system-level TRIM command and locking my virtual memory to a fixed 16GB to stop the constant random writes to the physical disk. In my boot tests, the time to reach the main menu dropped from 28 seconds to 14 seconds, which is a massive leap. During the TRIM process, disk usage spiked to 100% and the system froze for a bit, but it recovered once the process finished. Temps are a cool 40-48℃. Switched the disk mode to High Performance, and frame times are now stable at 5.1-6.4ms.
