How to fix I/O blocking on Great Wall GW3300 512GB SSD?
Whenever I hit the snowfields, my 4K random read speeds were jumping wildly between 60ms - 110ms, which caused these brutal 200ms+ stutters that completely killed the immersion. I first tried enabling write caching in the OS, but that was a mistake; sequential writes improved, but random read latency actually spiked by another 12ms, which left me totally baffled. I eventually caved and installed the latest official NVMe drivers from the manufacturer, bumped the Queue Depth from 1024 to 2048, and killed the HDD hibernation mode in the power plan. Checking HWiNFO, the random read latency finally settled into a stable 18ms - 25ms range, and my load times dropped from a painful 15 seconds down to 6 seconds. It was a nightmare at first because disabling write cache entirely caused the game to crash during map loads, and things only stabilized once I switched to forced flush mode. SSD temps are now sitting at 45℃ - 58℃ with the controller hitting 52℃ - 60℃. Ran some stress tests and the I/O blocking is officially gone.
