Why does Starfield freeze during fast travel on FireCuda 540?
Every time I tried to warp between planets, the loading bar would just freeze at 99% for several seconds. It was an agonizing wait. The Seagate FireCuda 540 2TB couldn't handle the massive burst of fragmented resource requests in Starfield because the default driver queue depth was too shallow, causing I/O response times to spike between 200-600ms. I tried reformatting the drive to a 64K cluster size in Windows Disk Management, but that actually made loading two seconds slower—proving that the physical format wasn't the problem. I ended up digging into the registry to modify the 'MaxQueueDepth' parameter for the NVMe driver, bumping it up to 256. In CrystalDiskMark's deep queue tests, random reads stayed rock solid at 65-72MB/s. I did trigger a boot error after the registry edit, but resetting the page file to system-managed fixed it. Temps are 40-48℃. The I/O is finally flowing without any deadlocks.
