Less than a week since AMD acknowledged a Radeon driver issue that was eating up solid-state drive lifespans, the firm has published a fix. However, this patch isn’t yet part of the main release channel.
For those who missed the news earlier this week, some Radeon users discovered that the AMD External Events Client Module service was erroneously writing small chunks of data to their SSDs. The per-second writes could be up to 5MB in size, slowly building to far larger totals. If left unaddressed for a month, for example, this could build to 13TB, invisibly removing 2% of many 1TB drives’ lifespans.
AMD acknowledged the issue, promising a fix in the next Radeon driver, but didn’t clarify when we should expect its release. Turns out we didn’t need to wait all long, with Adrenalin Edition 26.11.1 arriving just days after the problem entered the spotlight. The release notes also provide some clarity on affected products.
The highlights section of the driver’s web page read as follows:
- Excessive writes to the system drive may be observed while the system is idle on Radeon RX 7000 series graphics products and above.
- Excessive writes to the system drive may be observed while moving or resizing application windows.
In short, if you have a Radeon RX 6000 series graphics card or older then you shouldn’t need this optional driver. While AMD highlights that Radeon RX 7000 series GPUs and above are susceptible to this problem, it doesn’t clarify whether RDNA 3 and RDNA 3.5 integrated graphics across handhelds and processors are at risk. I’d err on the side of caution and update regardless in those cases.
However, it seems there are plenty of other proverbial fires that AMD has on its radar per this driver release. The issues mainly concern game crashes, driver timeouts, and other bugs across various titles and graphics cards. It’s worth giving the known issues section a read, just in case this new version introduces problems you’d rather avoid for the time being, particularly if you’re playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4.
You can read the full release notes and download AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition 26.11.1 here. For more graphics card chatter, check out our picks of the best GPUs on the market.
