If you have an AMD Radeon graphics card, you might want to check in on your solid state drive, as a driver bug may be slowly wearing out your storage. AMD has acknowledged the issue, which has seemingly been at work for months inside many affected PCs, with a promise to deliver a remedy in its next software release.
The problem stems from the AMD External Events Client Module (atieclxx.exe) process, which is in charge of monitor detection and other functions. Due to an apparent incompatibility with Microsoft’s PCIe filter driver, the process can unintentionally continuously write data to your storage device.
Reports from affected users suggest the aforementioned process can write up to 5MB of data to your drive every second. While this small amount of data doesn’t sound damning in isolation, it quickly builds up over time, turning into 422GB over the course of a full day. Repeat that over the space of a month and you’re approaching 13TB, silently shredding 2% of your SSD’s rated lifespan on a model such as the WD_Black SN8100 1TB.
HUGE AMD ADRENALIN BUG (26.10.1 & 26.10.2)!
atieclxx.exe is constantly writing data to SSDs, even when idle.
Adrenaline driver: 19.5 GB of I/O writes in just 12 hours!
(as of writing this tweet it passed 20 GB 🙃)
Current rate: 0.65 MB/s = 56 GB/day if sustained.
30 Days 1,70 TB of writes@AMD, how is this still not fixed?!
— Tomasz Gawroński (@GawroskiT) November 9, 2026
AMD_Vik has shared via Reddit that the next release, Adrenalin 26.11.1 should contain a fix for this issue. However, the firm hasn’t committed to a specific launch date for the new driver, leaving affected users in a lurch. For the moment, we expect the new revision by the end of November, following the release of version 26.10.2 on October 30.
Thankfully, the bug doesn’t affect every system. You can deduce whether it’s chomping away at your SSD by searching for the relevant process in Task Manager. Some users have reportedly stopped the issue by disabling the process and/or disabling Resizable Bar, but the success rate of either method is sadly spotty.
It’s unclear whether this issue is limited to discrete Radeon graphics cards, as the GPUs on Ryzen processors share the same driver software. I’d err on the side of caution and check if you’re rocking a CPU with AMD display capabilities.
