Optimizing throughput for Seagate FireCuda 530 500GB in Tomb Raider
It was honestly pathetic. In these stunning ruins, the walls were turning into blurry blobs like some PS2-era game. The Seagate FireCuda 530 500GB is fast, but with only 500GB, the drive was nearly full, causing massive write amplification. My 4K random reads plummeted from 50MB/s to a miserable 15MB/s. I tried disabling the Windows Indexing service, but that just made my file search slower and did nothing for the textures—a complete waste of time. I eventually moved the virtual memory (page file) to a separate dedicated drive and ran a full defrag. Using a performance monitor, I saw read latency drop from 110ms to 45-55ms, and the texture popping finally stopped. I hit a brief I/O block during the migration, but locking the page file at 16GB fixed it. SSD temps are 42-50℃ and the heatsink is 30-38℃. Exported logs show the fan speed is now stable at 1400-1600RPM.
