How to boost random reads on Intel 760P 512GB?
Trying to load all those stealth-related fragment files on this drive felt like wading through mud. The loading bar would just hang at 80% every single time—absolute torture. While the Intel 760P 512GB has an SLC cache, its 4K random read response times were swinging between 120-250ms, leaving the CPU just spinning its wheels. I tried moving the game to a different drive, but the load times actually increased by 10 seconds. It felt like trying to open a vault with a toothpick. I eventually reformatted the partition and bumped the cluster size from 4KB to 64KB and killed Windows Defender's real-time scanning to lighten the I/O load. In Resource Monitor, random reads jumped from 50-70MB/s to 90-110MB/s. I actually broke a few old legacy apps by changing the cluster size, so I had to tweak it back to a middle ground. Drive temps are 44-52℃ and the controller is at 55-61℃. Exported the latency data to confirm the fix.
