Does the WD SN850X 1TB need 4K alignment for Ghost of Tsushima?
This drive was handling open-world fragmented data like a cheap thumb drive; random reads actually dipped to 40 MB/s, which is just ridiculous. I tried running a defrag in Windows, but that's a total waste of time for an SSD and just adds unnecessary wear—I can't believe I even tried that. I then used a professional partition tool and found the starting offset wasn't 4K aligned. I nuked the partition, realigned it, and updated the drivers. In the analyzer, 4K random reads jumped from 600k to 950k IOPS, with temps staying around 45℃-52℃. I almost bricked my boot sequence because I accidentally deleted a boot file during the first attempt, but a recovery disk saved my skin. Now, switching scenes is a breeze with zero noticeable pauses. It's kind of a joke that I had to dig into partition offsets to fix this, but it worked. I exported all the performance logs to confirm the gain.
