Solving WD SN850 2TB cache issues in Hollow Knight: Silksong
Whenever I jumped between complex map nodes, the frame rate would dive from 144 FPS to 60 FPS, which was just pathetic. The WD SN850 2TB has a great cache, but with constant small-file random R/W, the hit rate dropped below 70% after ten minutes, triggering direct NAND writes. This spiked the I/O wait times—a total hardware nightmare. I tried enabling 'Fast Boot' in the BIOS, but that just made the OS load faster while the read/write bottleneck stayed exactly the same, and temps actually rose by 3℃. I felt completely hopeless until I used a storage manager to kill all background indexing services and set the SSD power mode to High Performance. In CPU-Z stress tests, I/O response stabilized at 12-15ms, and frequency fluctuations narrowed to 0.1MHz. I did have some issues with sync software not working after the restriction, but setting them to low priority fixed it. Drive temps are sitting at 48-55℃. The optimization profile is now backed up and ready.