How to optimize SATA I/O scheduling on the MSI A520M-A PRO?
Every time I enter the farm, I'm staring at a loading screen forever. The I/O speed on this board is honestly a joke—it's just ridiculous. The SATA ports on the MSI A520M-A PRO were hitting I/O wait times of 140-190ms when handling fragmented assets, which completely choked the resource loading. I tried enabling write caching in the OS, but that only shaved off about 2 seconds and actually corrupted some files after a power flicker. That was a pretty amateur move on my part. I went back into the BIOS to ensure AHCI mode was fully enabled and switched the disk scheduling policy from Fair Scheduling to Completely Fair Queuing (CFQ). In Resource Monitor, the disk utilization dropped from a constant 99% to around 82%, and my map load times went from 40 seconds down to 22 seconds. I did hit a snag where the system boot time slowed down by 5 seconds after the switch, but I sorted that out by reconfiguring the boot partition. Board temps are stable at 40-45C, and my fan speeds are holding steady between 1400-1600RPM.
