Why is my Seagate FireCuda 540 flickering in RDR2?
Riding through Saint Denis was a total nightmare; the 4K textures on the buildings were jumping all over the place, making the whole experience feel glitchy. Even though the Seagate FireCuda 540 2TB has insane theoretical speeds, it struggled with the massive amount of fragmented files from the mods, with I/O response times swinging wildly between 12ms - 45ms. I tried bumping my virtual memory up to 64GB at first, but that was a complete waste of time—it actually added more background read/write pressure. I eventually dove into Device Manager, bumped the NVMe controller queue depth from 1024 to 2048, and killed the Windows Indexing service. In CrystalDiskMark's 4K random read test, I saw numbers jump from 62MB/s to 88-94MB/s. I did hit a snag where the drive had a slight detection delay during boot after the first tweak, but switching the power plan to High Performance fixed it. The drive stayed around 52-58℃, feeling warm to the touch. Monitoring showed the data stream finally leveled out, with frame times locking in at 5.1-6.4ms.
