How do I fix the loading hitches on a Samsung 9100 PRO 8TB?
Whenever I hit the gates of Novigrad, the loading bar just hangs at 98% for about 2 seconds. It's incredibly jarring on a PCIe 5.0 drive. While the Samsung 9100 PRO 8TB has insane sequential speeds, the controller struggles with these massive partitions, causing the I/O queue depth to swing wildly between 32 and 128. This spikes response times to 15-40ms. I tried updating the BIOS first, but that actually made the hang 0.5 seconds longer—a total nightmare. I eventually went into Device Manager, forced the NVMe power management to 'Maximum Performance,' and used a low-level tool to lock the queue depth at 64. In HWiNFO, the latency curve flattened out immediately, and the transitions became seamless. I did notice a brief disk detection delay during standby right after the lock, but disabling the energy-saving options killed that issue. The SSD stays between 52-65℃, with the heatsink at 40-48℃. Benchmarks confirm the stutters are gone, and frame times are now rock steady at 5.1-6.4ms. Still, the drive runs noticeably hotter now.
