Solving Kioxia EXCERIA PRO 2TB link issues in Sword and Fairy 7
Entering large town maps caused the game to hitch for about half a second, which is enough to ruin a combat combo. The PCIe 4.0 link on the Kioxia EXCERIA PRO 2TB was hitting latency jumps of 12-18ms under load, leaving the CPU idling while waiting for data. I tried disabling all background Windows updates, but that did absolutely nothing—a pointless attempt against a hardware-level bottleneck. I went into the BIOS and changed the M.2 PCIe slot from 'Auto' to 'Forced Gen 4' and updated the chipset drivers. Using RivaTuner's frame time graph, the spikes dropped from 45ms to a manageable 11-14ms. Interestingly, forcing Gen 4 made my secondary SATA drive slow to detect at first, but I sorted that out by reassigning the SATA ports on the board. Temps are sitting at 50-56℃ with reads steady at 6800MB/s. After three hours of gaming, the hitches are gone. The link is finally verified and stable.
