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Hardware·1 min read

AMD Adrenalin 26.11.1 fixes Radeon driver SSD write bug

AMD's Radeon software was writing heavily to SSDs even when the PC sat idle. Adrenalin 26.11.1 is the fix, and it also covers a similar bug when moving windows.

An AMD Radeon graphics card installed in a PC next to an SSD drive.
Image: Antyweb
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If you run a Radeon graphics card, AMD Adrenalin 26.11.1 is worth installing soon. The driver package is meant to stop the Radeon software from hammering your SSD with writes for no good reason.

The problem was simple to describe and annoying to live with. AMD's software could cause excessive writes to solid-state drives even when the computer wasn't doing anything interesting. SSDs wear out with the amount of data written to them, so a driver that keeps writing in the background is not something you want running for months.

According to AMD, version 26.11.1 removes that problem. It also fixes a similar bug that showed up when you moved windows around the screen, which is the kind of everyday action nobody expects to cause disk activity.

What is Adrenalin 26.11.1?

Adrenalin is AMD's driver and control software for Radeon graphics cards. Version 26.11.1 is a fix-focused release rather than a feature update. The material available to us doesn't list other changes, so the two write-related fixes are what we can confirm.

Should you update?

If you use a Radeon card and have noticed unexplained disk activity, updating is the obvious step. Even if you haven't noticed anything, the bug could have been running quietly in the background, so there's little reason to wait. AMD hasn't been quoted here on how much wear the bug caused, so we can't say how much damage, if any, it did to a given drive.

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Tags:amdradeonadrenalingpu driversssd

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