Fixing WD Black SN850 2TB I/O bottlenecks in Sword and Fairy 7
Every time I enter a new map, I am staring at a black screen for ten seconds, which is just jarring in the upgraded version. The WD Black SN850 2TB hits a wall with 4K random reads/writes when handling small files, with response times fluctuating between 110-170 ms, totally choking the asset streaming. I tried enabling write cache flushing in Windows, but it only shaved off one second and actually corrupted a save file after a crash—that was a stressful mistake. Instead, I went into Device Manager, set the disk policy to High Performance, and updated the NVMe controller drivers. AIDA64 showed 4K random reads climbing from 58-65 MB/s to 82-90 MB/s, cutting load times by 35%. I noticed the OS boot time slowed down by 2 seconds after the change, but reconfiguring the boot partition sorted it out. Temps are sitting at 40-48 C, and the input response feels way more responsive now.
