Fixing Samsung 9100 PRO PCIe link drops in Mass Effect
When loading those massive galaxy maps, the game would occasionally just freeze for a split second. It's incredibly weird to experience that on top-tier hardware. My Samsung 9100 PRO 8TB was running in PCIe 5.0 mode, but I spotted in the logs that the link speed was flipping between x4 and x2, causing the bandwidth to swing wildly from 6GB/s to 12GB/s. I tried updating the BIOS first, which helped with some minor bugs, but the bandwidth jumping persisted. It became clear that signal interference was the real culprit. I went into the BIOS and forced the PCIe slot to Gen5 instead of 'Auto,' and disabled the CPU PCIe link power management. AIDA64 storage benchmarks then showed a rock-solid 12.5-13.1GB/s sequential read, and the freezes stopped completely. The drive's idle temp rose by about 5℃ after locking Gen5, so I added a small active fan to keep it at 45-50℃. Full load temps hit 62-68℃. The bandwidth tool shows the link is finally stable, and the game feels incredibly responsive.
