My Kioxia Exceria Pro is hitting I/O response delays that cause stuttering; what's the best way to handle this?

Entering the crowded city streets, I kept an eye on the disk activity and noticed that while bandwidth wasn't maxed, response times were jumping randomly between 16 - 35ms. The Kioxia Exceria Pro controller has a slight clock sync deviation when paired with certain PCIe 4.0 motherboard links, which manifests as these micro-hitches. I tried disabling Fast Startup first, but the instability remained, and I quickly gave up on that. I updated the firmware to the latest version and turned off the Link State Power Management in Windows, locking the disk power plan to High Performance. In RTSS, the frame time variance narrowed down to a tight 14 - 17ms range, and the gameplay felt fluid again. I did have a brief recognition lag at boot after the firmware flash, but a clean driver reinstall sorted it. Drive is running at 40 - 48℃. Everything is verified and stable.