Last week, AMD Radeon GPU users discovered that following one of the older Adrenalin driver updates, massive amounts of data were being continuously written to the system SSD. AMD acknowledged the bug and has now finally released a new driver update that addresses the issue.
For context, several users shared their discoveries on X (formerly Twitter) andReddit, showing a process called AMD External Events Client Module (atieclxx.exe) that was writing data to the system drive at up to 0.3 MB/s to 1.5 MB/s. In some cases, it went up to 5 MB/s, which would theoretically amount to around 432 GB of data written every day. This wasn’t actual data written to the drive, so the impact on SSD health and lifespan is unclear.
How to check and see if you’re affected
Notably, not all users are affected by this bug. To check if your system is impacted, follow these steps:
- PressCtrl + Shift + Esc to open Task Manager.
- Go to theDetails tab.
- Right-click on any column header and click on ‘Select columns’.
- EnableI/O Read Bytes andI/O Write Bytes.
- Sort by I/O Write Bytes and look for ‘atieclxx.exe’.
If the value keeps increasing, you’ll know that your system has been affected.
Now, AMD released Adrenalin Edition 26.11.1 as an optional driver update that brings two major fixes. One addresses the excessive writes to the system drive on idle for Radeon RX 7000 series GPUs, and the other addresses the same when “moving or resizing application windows,” though the latter is not GPU-specific.