How to fix FireCuda 540 I/O pressure in The Last of Us Part I?
Walking through those abandoned streets used to be stressful because of these random micro-stutters. The Seagate FireCuda 540 2TB was struggling with real-time asset loading, with the queue depth swinging violently between 32 - 64, forcing the CPU to wait on I/O responses. I tried lowering texture quality, but while the average FPS went up, the stuttering remained—it was clearly a data bottleneck, not a GPU issue. I moved the system page file from the C drive to a dedicated partition on the SSD and updated the NVMe controller drivers. In Resource Monitor, I watched the disk response time converge from a messy 12ms - 25ms to a stable 4ms - 8ms. I did experience some weird lag during the first launch after moving the page file, but a full reboot and clearing the shader cache wiped that out. Temps are sitting at 46℃ - 53℃. After two hours of exploring, the frame generation time is rock steady at 5.1ms - 6.4ms.
