AMD has shipped Adrenalin Edition 26.11.1, the driver it promised would stop Radeon PCs from writing junk data to their SSDs around the clock. The AMD Software Adrenalin Edition 26.11.1 release notes, last updated on November 12, list two fixed cases of “excessive writes to the system drive.”
The first case happens while the PC sits idle. The second happens while users move or resize application windows. AMD lists the idle fix for Radeon RX 7000 series cards and newer.
That detail matters. Owners of older cards, and anyone who applied a workaround, now have a few things to check.
What went wrong
The bug sits in the AMD External Events Utility, a Windows service that ships with the Adrenalin driver. Its process, atieclxx.exe, kept writing to the system drive even when nothing was happening on screen.
PCWorld reported that users saw steady write rates of 0.3 to 5 MB/s. In the worst reported case, that adds up to more than 400 GB per day. The problem affects Windows 10 and Windows 11 across several driver versions, but not every system shows it.
A PSA post on Reddit’s r/pcmasterrace brought the issue wide attention. According to PC Gamer, the poster said the driver had cost their SSD about 1% of health each month for 16 months. That figure comes from one user and has not been independently verified. PC Gamer also noted that its own staff could not reproduce the problem on one machine.
How AMD responded
AMD acknowledged the reports weeks before the fix. Community representative AMD_Matt wrote on AMD’s forum in October that the company was “looking into it with the aim to resolve it in a future driver release,” as PC Gamer and Hardware Busters reported. Hardware Busters dates that reply to October 21.
Later, AMD_Vik said on Reddit that the issue “should be fixed” in Adrenalin 26.11.1. Hardware Busters, citing VideoCardz, reported that AMD_Vik traced the cause to the External Events Utility interacting with Microsoft’s PCIe filter driver.
What changes for you
Your next step depends on your graphics card and on whether you already changed anything.
Radeon RX 7000 and newer
AMD’s notes name these cards for the idle-write fix. Installing 26.11.1 is the direct route. AMD lists Windows 10 and Windows 11, version 21H2 or later, as supported. For laptops and all-in-one PCs, AMD still recommends drivers from the PC maker.
Older Radeon cards
The 26.11.1 package supports RX 5000 and RX 6000 cards too. However, the release notes tie the idle fix only to RX 7000 and above. The window-resize fix carries no product limit in the notes. AMD has not said whether older cards were affected by the idle bug in the first place. If you own one, check your write activity after updating.
Check whether your PC is affected
- Press Windows+R, type resmon and press Enter.
- Open the Disk tab in Resource Monitor.
- Sort the list by the Write (B/sec) column.
- Look for atieclxx.exe or atiesrxx.exe writing steadily at the top.
PCWorld describes the same check. Run it once before you update and once after, so you can see whether the fix worked on your system.
Undo the workarounds
Many users applied stopgaps while waiting for AMD. Each one has a cost, so it makes sense to review them now.
| Workaround | Trade-off | After 26.11.1 |
|---|---|---|
| Disable the AMD External Events Utility service | May affect FreeSync and frame pacing | Set it back to its normal startup type in services.msc |
| Turn off Resizable BAR in the BIOS | Helps only some users | Turn it back on in the BIOS |
| Radeon-atieclxx-SSD-Fix “targeted protection” | Unofficial, use at your own risk | Its scheduled task should lift the block once the bug is fixed, or run its undo script |
One more note from AMD’s own list of known issues: Smart Access Memory may become disabled after installing 26.11.1 on Windows 10. Smart Access Memory is AMD’s name for Resizable BAR. Windows 10 users should confirm it is still on after the update.
How bad was the SSD wear?
The answer depends on the write rate and the drive. Hardware Busters ran the numbers for a PC left running nonstop.
- 0.65 MB/s works out to about 56 GB per day, or roughly 20 TB per year.
- 1.5 MB/s works out to about 130 GB per day, or roughly 47 TB per year.
- 5 MB/s works out to about 432 GB per day, or nearly 158 TB per year.
On a 1 TB TLC drive rated for 600 TBW, the lowest rate uses about 3% of the rated endurance per year. At 5 MB/s, it uses about a quarter. A 500 GB QLC drive rated for 200 TBW would pass its rating in well under two years at the worst rate. Hardware Busters stresses that these are host writes counted by Windows, and that no controlled test has been published.
Put simply, most desktop owners with a large TLC drive lost a small slice of endurance. Owners of small, low-endurance drives had more at stake.
Technical details: the every-second self-copy
An independent developer published Radeon-atieclxx-SSD-Fix on GitHub before AMD’s driver arrived. Version 2.1 appeared on November 9. The project is open source under the MIT license, and its author states it has no connection to AMD.
The author measured the bug with Windows event tracing. On affected drivers, atieclxx.exe copies itself every second from the driver folder to C:\Windows\System32\config\systemprofile\AppData\Local\AMD. The file is about 660 KB, which adds up to roughly 56 GB per day. The service then looks for setup files of amdkmpfd, a filter driver tied to Smart Access Memory. According to the author, this explains why turning off Resizable BAR helped some users.
Rather than disabling the service, the tool’s recommended mode blocks the SYSTEM account from overwriting that single file. The copy fails, while FreeSync, frame pacing and hotkeys keep working, the README says. A scheduled task runs three minutes after startup and then every 30 minutes. It reapplies the block after driver updates and removes it once it detects that AMD has fixed the bug.
The tool also estimates past damage from the write rate and the time since the AMD driver was installed. The author calls this an estimate, not a measurement. It will not start on PCs that allow only signed PowerShell scripts, and other driver versions may behave differently.
Open questions
What remains unclear is how many PCs were affected and since which driver release. One user on X, quoted by PC Gamer, traced the problem back to Adrenalin 26.7.1. AMD has not confirmed that. AMD has also not explained why only some systems showed the writes. Owners of RX 5000 and RX 6000 cards may want a clearer statement on whether the idle fix applies to them.
