Fixing Kioxia EXCERIA PRO 2TB performance for Mario Emulator?
Running this emulator on this drive felt like walking a tightrope. Write speeds would tank to 300 MB/s when loading large ROMs, which is just pathetic. Compared to Gen5 drives, these PCIe 4.0 NANDs just can't keep up under extreme loads, and the transfer latency was hovering around 15ms. I tried lowering the emulator's resolution to reduce the load, but that just made the crashes happen more often—a total waste of time. I finally used the system management tool to force a full-drive TRIM and manually aligned the partition to 4K. In stress tests, write speeds jumped back up to 3.5 GB/s. The system lagged for a bit right after the TRIM, but a reboot and clearing 100GB of junk space stabilized it. Boot times dropped from 30s to 12s. It's not top-tier speed, but at least it doesn't crash anymore. Temps are 46°C - 51°C.
