Why is my Zhitai TiPro9000 4TB showing high read/write latency and slow loading in Expeditions Rome?

The loading screen would just hang at 99% forever, which becomes a total nightmare when you're switching campaign maps frequently. I noticed the Zhitai TiPro9000 4TB was struggling with massive amounts of small files, with random 4K reads jumping wildly between 55-62MB/s, causing a huge backlog in the resource queue. I stupidly tried using a defrag tool first, which did absolutely nothing for speed and actually wasted 2GB of NAND endurance—I felt like an idiot after that. I finally installed the latest NVMe controller drivers, forced the write-cache flushing in Device Manager, and set my power plan to High Performance. Re-testing with CrystalDiskMark showed random reads jumping from 60MB/s to 82-88MB/s, and map load times dropped from 22 seconds to about 11 seconds. Interestingly, the idle temp climbed from 38℃ to 46℃ after the performance tweak, so I had to slap on an M.2 heatsink to keep it in the 42-48℃ range. Peak disk utilization stayed around 85-92% during loads. Ran a system disk check to ensure no corruption, and the IO bug is finally gone.