Improving storage throughput on ASRock H310CM-ITX for Tomb Raider?
Every time I entered a new exploration zone, the loading bar would just hang at 99% for an eternity. It completely killed the pacing of the game and honestly left me feeling super anxious. The SATA controller on the ASRock H310CM-ITX has this awful wake-up latency of 220-360ms when in low-power mode, which triggers I/O timeouts in the game engine. I tried the 'nuclear option' of formatting the drive and reinstalling the whole game, but the freezes kept happening randomly—a totally useless effort that just wasted my afternoon. I eventually migrated the drive from a SATA 2 port to a native SATA 3 port and disabled the 'Fast Startup' and energy-saving options in the power management settings. Running CrystalDiskMark, my random 4K reads jumped from 14-20MB/s to 24-30MB/s, and loading times plummeted from 28 seconds to 14 seconds. Funnily enough, the system boot time actually slowed down after the port swap until I fixed the boot priority in BIOS. The drive now sits at 36-42℃ and the chipset is at 50-56℃. The disk performance analyzer shows a smooth throughput curve now, and the input response feels way more connected.
