Why does BioShock 4 keep hitting I/O blocks and dropping frames during heavy scene loads on my FireCuda 530 500GB?

Diving into Rapture is a nightmare when the streaming assets hammer a 500GB drive. I saw response times spike from 0.1ms to a brutal 18-25ms, causing visible screen tearing. On the FireCuda 530, if your free space dips below 20%, the default garbage collection creates a massive instruction queue. I wasted time cranking my virtual memory to 32GB, which was a total fail—it actually slowed the system down by 12%. I eventually went into Advanced Disk Management, forced the write cache to 'Flush', and fixed the 4K partition alignment. In CrystalDiskMark random read tests, latency dropped to 12-15ms and the stuttering mostly vanished. I did hit a weird recognition lag right after the change, but switching Windows Power Plan from 'Balanced' to 'High Performance' locked it in. Temps stayed between 42-50℃ with the heatsink. Benchmarks show the throughput curve is finally flat, with frame times sitting steady at 5.1-6.4ms.