How to reduce Seagate FireCuda 530 2TB latency in AC Shadows?
Sprinting through Kyoto is great until the screen hitches, which totally ruins the immersion. The Seagate FireCuda 530 2TB was struggling with fragmented open-world data, with random read latency swinging between 11-19ms. I tried bumping the virtual memory to 64GB, but that just hammered the drive with more writes and actually made the stuttering worse—definitely a lesson learned. I ended up reformatting the drive to a 64KB allocation unit size and disabled the system prefetch. Monitoring tools showed random read latency drop from 15ms to 7-9ms, and scene transitions became seamless. I did hit some compatibility errors with a few old apps after the format, but a driver reinstall fixed it. Temps are stable at 42-48℃. Frame time analysis confirms the drops are gone, though RAM temps are still around 58-63℃.
