How to speed up WD Black SN850 2TB loading times?
Staring at a loading bar for thirty seconds every time I launch the game is absolute torture in the 4K era. The controller on the WD Black SN850 2TB was struggling with fragmented boot files, with random reads bottoming out at 0.8-1.5MB/s, causing a massive I/O queue pile-up. I tried running a disk defrag—which is a joke for an SSD—and it actually made the load time 7 seconds longer, which just added to my frustration. I eventually verified AHCI mode was active in the BIOS and tweaked the registry to set the game drive to the highest response priority. CrystalDiskMark showed 4K reads climbing from 1.4MB/s to 3.2MB/s, cutting my boot time from 40 seconds down to 20. I did hit a snag where the system failed to boot after the first registry edit, but I fixed it by resetting the default boot entries and re-configuring. Temps are stable at 42-50℃, and the input response now feels snappy and immediate.
