Why is my WD Black SN850 lagging in Red Dead Redemption 2?
Whenever I hit the dense buildings in Saint Denis, the drive struggles with the massive stream of high-res textures. I saw random read speeds swinging wildly between 45MB/s and 120MB/s, which tanked my frame rate from 75 FPS down to a choppy 30 FPS. I initially tried pinning the page file to 16GB, but that software tweak did absolutely nothing for the hardware I/O bottleneck—it actually messed up some texture loads, which was incredibly frustrating. I finally shifted gears and installed the latest official Western Digital NVMe controller drivers and set the HDD turn-off time to 0 minutes in Windows Power Options. Checking AIDA64, the random read latency tightened up from a messy 15-45ms range to a rock-steady 8-12ms. I did hit a snag where the drive wasn't recognized immediately after the update, but a quick M.2 reseat and cleaning the gold pins fixed it. Temps sat between 42-51℃ with the heatsink feeling warm. After a three-hour stress test, the read curve is back to baseline and frame times are locked at 5.1-6.4ms.
