Mass Effect keeps hanging at 90% on the loading screen with Asgard Thor DDR5 6400; how do I deal with this sluggishness?

Every time I tried to enter the galaxy map, I had to stare at that loading bar forever—it's absolute torture in a modern game. The disk controller for the Asgard Thor DDR5 6400 was struggling with fragmented assets, with random read speeds hitting a pathetic 0.7-1.4MB/s, causing the I/O queue to back up. I tried running a disk defrag, but that actually made the loading 12 seconds slower—I was honestly ready to throw my monitor. I went into the BIOS to ensure AHCI mode was active and then tweaked the registry to set the game's SSD to the highest response priority. CrystalDiskMark showed 4K reads jump from 1.3MB/s to 3.0MB/s, and load times dropped from 48 seconds to 24 seconds. I messed up the registry the first time and the system wouldn't boot, which I had to fix by restoring defaults and re-configuring. SSD temps sat at 40-46℃. I exported the registry fix to a backup, and memory temps are holding steady at 40-46℃.