Textures are disappearing in Expeditions Rome when loading the Rome map on my Intel 660P 2TB SSD.

It was a disaster—grand Roman architecture suddenly turning into blurry blobs of color. I knew immediately my storage chain was bottlenecking. Since the Intel 660P 2TB uses QLC NAND, once that SLC cache runs dry during massive loads, speeds tank from 1500MB/s down to a pathetic 300-400MB/s, leaving the VRAM starving for assets. I tried running a defrag tool first, which was a huge mistake; not only did it do nothing, but it just added unnecessary wear to the cells. Total frustration. I eventually grabbed the Intel Memory and Storage Tool, bumped the firmware from 1.0.4 to 1.2.1, and wiped the drive to ensure a proper 4K aligned partition. AIDA64 benchmarks now show sequential reads holding steady between 1400-1600MB/s without those cliff-edge drops. I almost lost it when the drive vanished from BIOS after the update because my motherboard firmware was ancient, but a BIOS flash brought it back. Idle temps are 32-38℃, peaking at 55-61℃ under load. Everything is loading perfectly now, and my RAM is hovering around 58-63℃.