WORLDTECHAMD Confirms Radeon Driver Bug Causing Excess SSD Writes
AMD has confirmed that its current Radeon driver releases, Adrenalin 26.10.1 and 26.10.2, cause some systems to write dozens of gigabytes of unnecessary data to their solid-state drives. According to a report by TechPowerUp, the company has said a fix is coming with Adrenalin 26.11.1.
Faulty component identified on Windows systems
The problem has been traced to the External Events Client Module, which runs on Windows machines under the file name atieclxx.exe. The module belongs to AMD's External Events Utility, a background component that handles tasks such as detecting connected monitors and responding to hotkeys used by the Radeon software.
According to the reports, the module keeps the system drive busy with a constant stream of write operations. The write rate reported by affected users ranges from 0.3 MB/s to 1.5 MB/s, while one Reddit user described sustained activity of 5 MB/s.
Scale of the unnecessary writes
The faulty behaviour causes the SSD to write dozens of gigabytes of data that serve no purpose. Because the writes happen in the background, affected users may not notice them until they examine disk activity directly.
The source for this report is TechPowerUp. The facts available describe AMD's confirmation of the issue and the planned fix, but do not state how many systems are affected.
Open questions
- How many users are affected by the excessive writes?
- Will the fix in Adrenalin 26.11.1 fully stop the unnecessary writes?