AMD has acknowledged a bug in its Radeon Adrenalin software for Windows: on some PCs the AMD External Events Client Module (atieclxx.exe), which ships with every Adrenalin install and handles monitor hot-plug, Radeon hotkeys and some FreeSync functions, keeps writing to the boot drive even when the PC is idle. Owners have measured about 0.3 to 1.5 MB/s; one Reddit user logged about 5 MB/s, which would be about 432 GB of writes a day if it never stopped.
What AMD said: on 21 October an AMD forum representative, AMD_Matt, wrote: "We're looking into it with the aim to resolve it in a future driver release." Another, AMD_Vik, later traced it to an interaction between the External Events Utility and Microsoft's PCIe filter driver and said a fix had been submitted. Hardware Busters says he pointed to Adrenalin 26.11.1; Wccftech says AMD has not confirmed a version and the fix may have missed the next driver's cutoff. Adrenalin 26.10.2, released on 30 October, does not mention the issue.
How bad is it? Not settled. One owner claims the drive lost about 1% of its health every month for 16 months; Hardware Busters calls that unverified. The figures are writes as Windows counts them, not what reaches the flash, no controlled tests have been published, and many Radeon owners see nothing unusual. By Hardware Busters' estimate, 0.65 MB/s would use about 3% a year of a 1 TB TLC drive rated for 600 TBW, while 5 MB/s could wear out a 500 GB QLC drive rated for 200 TBW in under two years.
