AMD has released its Adrenalin 26.11.1 optional graphics driver, bringing the promised fix for a bug that caused excessive writes to system drives on Radeon-powered PCs. The issue could occur even when the computer was idle, potentially accumulating hundreds of gigabytes of unnecessary writes over time.
According to AMD’s release notes, the update addresses two instances of the problem. The first involves excessive writes to the system drive while the system is idle on Radeon RX 7000 series graphics products and newer, while the second concerns similar activity when moving or resizing application windows. For those affected, you can download the Adrenalin 26.11.1 driver by clicking this link.
As reported earlier this week, the problem was traced to the AMD External Events Utility, specifically its External Events Client Module process, known as atieclxx.exe. Users discovered that the process was continuously writing data to their SSDs, with reported rates ranging from 0.3MB/s to as much as 5MB/s. At the higher rate, this could amount to approximately 432GB of writes in a single day if left running uninterrupted.
Before the official fix arrived, AMD suggested checking for the issue through Windows Resource Monitor, while affected users could try disabling the AMD External Events Utility or turning off Resizable BAR in their BIOS. However, neither workaround was ideal, as the former could affect certain Radeon features and hotkeys, while the latter could potentially reduce gaming performance.
There was also an unofficial open-source tool called Radeon-atieclxx-SSD-Fix, which offered another workaround by blocking the problematic writes without disabling the External Events Utility. Thankfully, with AMD now providing an official solution, affected users should install the latest driver instead of relying on these temporary measures.
(Source: AMD [official website])
