The Last of Us Part II has massive read latency spikes on my Zhitai TiPro9000 4TB during scene transitions; do I need to adjust virtual memory?

Every time I entered a new city ruin, the loading bar would just hang at 90% for seconds. It was incredibly stressful. The issue is that once the Zhitai TiPro9000's dynamic SLC cache fills up, the random read speed craters from 7000MB/s to under 1200MB/s, causing the game to essentially freeze. I tried setting the virtual memory to half of the drive's free space, but on a 4TB drive, that just created more I/O conflicts and made the stuttering worse. I ended up installing the latest NVMe controller drivers, disabled HDD hibernation in the power options, and forced the write cache to flush mode. In CrystalDiskMark, 4K random reads jumped from 55-62MB/s to 78-85MB/s, cutting load times by 40%. I had a brief moment where the drive wasn't recognized after the driver update, but a chipset update cleared that right up. Temps stay between 45-58℃ with the stock heatsink. The in-game performance tool shows the latency is gone, and the controls feel much more responsive.