I recently switched to a WD Black M.2 SSD as the primary drive on my gaming PC. I was using an HDD earlier, so, of course, I expected a lot of performance gains and faster load times on my video games. That happened. However, I began noticing delays and brief stutters in daily usage, as well as random freezes when launching video games. It wasn’t constant, but enough to make me look deeper and figure out why it was happening. The culprit behind the stutters was a power setting that resulted in the SSD napping on the job, or more accurately, napping in-between jobs, A Windows power-saving feature is the culprit With great power saving comes great latency Over the years, it’s become tricky to find a sweet spot between battery life and performance on Windows PCs. It’s because Microsoft has aggressively dialed up Windows’ power-saving features. While this has its advantages: you spend less on electricity, and laptops have better battery life, it does cause performance issues that discerning users will easily notice. By …