How to fix I/O blocking on Great Wall GW3300 in Hellblade 2?
With those insanely detailed environments, my Great Wall GW3300 512GB started showing some nasty sawtooth spikes in the read/write curves, especially since I had less than 20% free space left. I noticed the NVMe bus was struggling with fragmented assets, with latency jumping wildly between 115ms - 142ms, which felt like the game was just dying during loads. At first, I tried disabling the Windows Indexing service, but that was a total waste of time—loading actually took 3 seconds longer, which left me completely baffled. I eventually dove into the advanced storage settings and manually locked the drive queue depth to 32, while pinning the virtual memory page file at 16GB. Checking HWiNFO, the read latency finally settled down to a much healthier 45ms - 58ms, and the asset streaming became way smoother. To be honest, I hit two random crashes right after the first tweak, and it only stayed rock steady after I forced the motherboard PCIe mode to Gen3 instead of leaving it on Auto. Now the drive sits comfortably between 48℃ - 55℃. After running the system performance analyzer, the scheduling logic is finally stable, and my frame times are holding steady at 5.1ms - 6.4ms.
