Why is my Kioxia EXCERIA PRO 2TB freezing in Mass Effect?
Right when my ship was about to jump to a new system, the game would just hang for about 30 seconds. It completely kills the immersion. The Kioxia EXCERIA PRO's boot protocol was hitting a massive queue bottleneck with random small files, with speeds jumping erratically between 20MB/s and 500MB/s. I first tried disabling all startup apps in Windows, which only shaved off three seconds and did nothing for the freezes—I was honestly tempted to just throw the PC out the window. I eventually downloaded the latest BIOS patch and performed a forced flash, while completely disabling CSM to force a pure UEFI boot. The boot logs showed resource loading time dropping from 40 seconds to 11 seconds, and the freezes are gone. I did have a scare where the BIOS settings wiped because my CMOS battery was dying, but a new battery fixed it. SSD temps are 38-45℃. The boot sequence is finally optimized, though the drive still runs a bit warm.
