Sound will cut out at random , which leads to a freeze, and crash. Never happened before newest penance update

[Axloss]

Beside trying to disable direct storage you can also try this that seems to help some

Crashtide: Crash of Crashemption

another thing you could try is in game files you find the file settings_common.ini with the setting use_blocking_io = true, set this to false. This will be the default in the future, so currently it’s quite untested. But it could help If you can please try it out with direct storage and let us know if it improves anything. can i ask if your SSD is connected with m2, SATA or some other interface?