Why does my Intel 660P 2TB cause hitching in Gears 5?
Right in the middle of a heated cover fight, the game would just hitch for about 0.5 seconds, completely killing my rhythm. The Intel 660P 2TB uses QLC NAND, and when it hits those fragmented assets, the random 4K read latency just spikes wildly between 60ms - 110ms, which bottlenecks the whole loading process. I initially tried disabling the write cache in Windows to see if it helped with stability, but that was a mistake—loading times actually jumped by 30%, leaving me totally baffled. I eventually went into the driver panel and forced the queue depth to 32, while simultaneously disabling the HDD power saving mode in the Power Options. Monitoring with CrystalDiskMark showed the random read latency finally settling down to a consistent 22ms - 35ms, and the map transitions finally felt fluid again. I did run into a nightmare where messing with the registry caused my boot drive to be recognized slowly, but I fixed that by reverting the write policy to default. The drive stayed around 42℃ - 48℃, feeling warm to the touch. Final benchmarks confirmed IOPS peaked at 150K, and the settings actually stuck this time.
