How to fix cache scheduling on Seagate FireCuda 530 2TB SSD?
Seeing distant mountains render as blocky pixels is a nightmare in a fast-paced fighter. The Seagate FireCuda 530's dynamic SLC cache is the culprit; once it's topped off, write speeds crater from 6000MB/s to under 1200MB/s, causing a massive bottleneck in resource scheduling. My first instinct was to set the page file to half of the remaining drive space, but that actually made things worse in large maps, increasing the frequency of frame drops. I then went into Device Manager and bumped the NVMe controller queue depth from 1024 up to 2048, while enabling the forced write cache flush policy in system performance options. Running CrystalDiskMark, I saw 4K random reads jump from 52 - 60MB/s to 75 - 82MB/s, and the texture pop-in basically vanished. I did notice a brief drive detection delay during idle after the queue tweak, but switching power management to 'High Performance' killed that glitch. Drive temps sat between 42 - 48℃. Using the in-game performance overlay, I confirmed the loading errors are gone, though my RAM temps hovered around 58 - 63℃.
