Why does Great Wall GW3300 2TB crash my PC in Starfield?
The speed on this drive is a joke. It claims PCIe 4.0, but loading a single planet can literally reboot my entire rig. It is wild. The controller hits a power spike of 7W within 1.2ms - 1.5ms during heavy random reads, which triggers the overcurrent protection on my budget motherboard. It felt like the PC was playing a game of chicken with me. I tried disabling Fast Startup in Windows, but the crashes didn't stop—that was a total amateur move. I eventually used a frequency control tool to force the NVMe link speed down from Gen4 to Gen3 and locked the disk power plan to Balanced. My power analyzer showed the peaks smoothed out to 4W - 6W, and the restarts stopped completely. Sure, my read speed dropped from 3500MB/s to 2000MB/s, but the actual load time only increased by 2 seconds. Totally worth the trade-off. Temps are 40℃ - 52℃ with fans at 1200 RPM. I exported all the crash timestamps from the system log, and the data is finally clean.
