Fixing WD Black SN850 2TB hitching in Marvel's Spider-Man 2
Every time I dive between Manhattan skyscrapers, the frame rate tanks from 60 FPS to a choppy 22 FPS, which is jarring as hell. The WD SN850 2TB's 4K random reads were fluctuating between 14-38ms when handling fragmented assets, causing the engine to hang while waiting for data. I tried running a disk defrag out of desperation, which I later realized is completely pointless for NVMe drives and just adds unnecessary wear—I felt like an idiot for that. I eventually used a partition tool to ensure a perfect 4K alignment and bumped the disk I/O priority to 'High' via the registry, while killing Windows Indexing. Monitoring with RTSS, the frame time spikes dropped from 48ms to a manageable 17-23ms. The only downside was that system file searches became sluggish until I added a specific exclusion for the game folder. The drive stays cool at 44-52℃. The input lag is gone, and the swinging finally feels responsive to my fingertips.
