Why does my Samsung 9100 PRO 2TB stutter in Lost Ark?
Whenever I hit the main port city, the 4K random read speeds were swinging wildly between 80 - 120ms, which basically froze my screen for over 200ms. I tried enabling write caching in Windows, but that was a disaster—it bumped write speeds but actually added another 10ms to the read latency. I was totally baffled. I eventually installed the latest Samsung NVMe drivers and pushed the Queue Depth from 1024 to 2048, while killing the HDD sleep mode in the power plan. Checking HWiNFO, the random read latency finally settled into a tight 15 - 22ms range, and my load times dropped from 12 seconds to a snappy 4 seconds. Funnily enough, disabling write cache entirely made the game crash during map loads until I toggled the Force Flush mode. SSD temps stayed around 42 - 55℃ with the heatsink at 38 - 42℃. OCCT stress tests prove no more I/O blocking, with frame times now rock steady at 5.1 - 6.4ms.
