Is a firmware update necessary for WD SN850 2TB stability in Expeditions: Rome?
It was honestly ridiculous—this SN850 is supposed to be a beast, but it kept giving me BSODs while loading Roman maps, making it feel like a decade-old budget drive. The logs showed the old firmware had serious instruction conflicts with 4K alignment requests, causing I/O response times to swing wildly between 0.1ms and 500ms. I wasted three hours reformatting and repartitioning the drive, which did absolutely nothing—a complete waste of time. I finally used the official dashboard to flash the latest firmware and disabled 'Fast Startup' in Windows. Monitoring with RivaTuner showed response times stabilizing between 0.2-0.8ms, and the crashes vanished completely. I did have a scare when the update software froze during the flash, but a reboot and a second attempt fixed it. Drive temps are now a steady 45-52℃ with speeds around 6500MB/s. I exported the I/O error logs from Event Viewer to confirm the fix, and fan speeds are hovering at 1400-1600RPM.
