I had a painful slow game load experience during the past few days. In the beginning, I tried everything I can to tweak the Win10 system, cleanup the PC box, but the disk IO was always pegging at 2MB/s to 5MB/s at taskmgr.exe.

The real culprit? The WD ssd I bought some years ago. Turns out if the data was old enough, the firmware had real trouble recognizing the volatile bits and throttles the throughput.

The fix? read the file again and write them back. Since my disk is almost full (another reason here), a inline replace would be prefered.

I spent next few hours vibe coding an HTML5 utility

https://lab.est.im/ssd-warmup/

The code works as intended, however the File System API in Javascript writes a .crswap file instead of the original.
It's a Chromium thing thus makes the JS method completely useless.

I wrote a Python version instead.

https://github.com/est/snippets/blob/master/ssd-warmup/ssd_warmup.py

The AI wrote code using os.path.walk and I changed it with pathlib.Path, which was more pleasant with its rglob method.

You can try it:

python ssd_warmup.py /path/to/fix/

The lesson learned: Don't buy Sandick or WestData. At least the low-end ones.