My Biostar B550MH keeps freezing for a split second when loading big maps in A Plague Tale: Requiem. How do I fix this?

Whenever I entered a street swarming with rats, the game would just freeze for about 0.5 seconds. In a game this atmospheric, that kind of hitching is a total mood killer. The M.2 slot on the Biostar B550MH was hitting I/O delays of 120-150ms during high-concurrency reads, causing the assets to desync. I tried disabling the write cache in Windows, but that was a mistake—read speeds dropped by 20%. I eventually went into the BIOS and forced the PCIe link speed to Gen4 instead of Auto and updated the SSD firmware. In CrystalDiskMark, my random reads jumped from 42MB/s to 65MB/s, and the freezes vanished. One annoying thing: after forcing Gen4, my second M.2 slot stopped working, and I had to manually reassign the lane priorities to get it back. SSD temps are between 45-55℃ and the chipset is at 58-63℃. Loading times are finally consistent, and RAM temps are a steady 42-47℃.