Why does my Kioxia EXCERIA PLUS G4 2TB hit I/O blocking and drop frames while driving fast in Night City?

Tearing through the neon streets, I noticed these micro-stutters whenever high-res models loaded in, which is a total buzzkill for anyone chasing a buttery smooth experience. The controller on the Kioxia EXCERIA PLUS G4 was struggling with fragmented assets, causing the I/O queue depth to swing wildly between 32 - 64, which spiked random read latency from 15 - 22ms. I initially tried killing all background sync services in Windows, but that was a dead end; it didn't stop the drops and actually made my boot times feel sluggish. I eventually dove into the Registry to force the disk scheduling algorithm from 'Balanced' to 'High Performance' and flashed the latest firmware from the vendor. Monitoring via a latency analyzer showed response times plummeting from 18.4ms to a tight 6.2 - 8.5ms. I did hit a snag where the system randomly rebooted twice after the registry tweak, but switching the Windows Power Plan to 'High Performance' locked everything down. Temps stayed around 45 - 52℃ with the heatsink doing its job. Benchmarking the throughput showed frame times finally stabilizing between 5.1 - 6.4ms on Win11 24H2.