WD Black SN850 causing I/O crashes in Expeditions: Rome?
It's honestly pathetic that a top-tier Black drive would throw I/O errors while loading a map of Rome; the instability was just laughable. The WD Black SN850 1TB had some serious compatibility conflicts with the drivers on Windows 11, which triggered a full BSOD whenever it tried to load 4K textures. I tried disabling the AHCI power-saving mode in the BIOS, but that just made the loading times 5 seconds longer—totally the wrong move. I finally used the official software to update the firmware to version 2.1.0 and ran a 4K alignment calibration on the partitions. After 5 consecutive runs of CrystalDiskMark, my random reads stabilized at 65-72MB/s and the game stopped crashing. I did notice a faint coil whine from the drive during idle after the update, but I got rid of it by tweaking the PCIe power management in the motherboard settings. The drive temperature is now a cool 42-48℃. I've backed up the disk config, and the temps are holding steady at 42-48℃.
