Why is Mass Effect Legendary Edition loading so slowly?
I can't believe a 1TB branded drive made me wait nearly 20 seconds just to load a star map. It's a joke. The SLC cache on the Zhitai TiPro9000 gets hijacked by background apps, and the write speed just falls off a cliff from 7000MB/s to about 1200MB/s. This makes loading feel incredibly fragmented. I tried running a defrag in Disk Management, which was a huge mistake—you don't defrag an NVMe drive. It didn't help and just added unnecessary wear. I finally installed the latest official drivers and changed the Windows write caching policy to 'force flush'. In CrystalDiskMark, my 4K random reads jumped from 55MB/s to 72-78MB/s, and load times dropped to 6 seconds. Interestingly, the drive hit 72℃ right after the driver tweak, so I had to slap on an aluminum heatsink to bring it back to 58-63℃. The read/write curve is finally stable. Exported the logs and the cache scheduling is now optimized.
