How to stop WD SN850 write slowdowns in Mass Effect?
Every time a patch hit 50GB, my write speeds would plummet from 6000MB/s to 800MB/s, which is honestly anxiety-inducing. The SN850's dynamic cache fails once the drive is over 80% full, causing write latency to spike from 10ms to 150ms, which triggers those system-wide micro-stutters. I tried running a disk defrag first, which is a joke for NVMe drives and just added unnecessary wear—a frustrating mistake. I eventually used a partition tool to leave 15% of the drive as unallocated space for Over-Provisioning and updated to the latest firmware via WD Dashboard. In my second test, even at 70% capacity, writes stayed stable between 3500-4000MB/s, and the stuttering vanished. I actually almost bricked my boot sequence by accidentally deleting the EFI partition while setting up the OP space, but I fixed it with a PE tool. Drive temps are now 48-56℃ with latency at 12-18ms. Performance analysis shows the cache is behaving, and the input lag is gone.
