AMD Radeon driver bug writes to SSDs even when PC is idle

How big is the problem

Reported write rates typically sit between 0.3 and 1.5 MB/s, and in the worst case described they reach 5 MB/s. That works out to roughly 26 GB per day at the low end and as much as 432 GB per day at the top. For a typical 500 GB SSD rated for 300 TBW, that could consume between 3.16% and 52.56% of the rated write endurance in a year. These figures rely on data reported by Windows, not on confirmed writes to the flash cells themselves.

What AMD says

AMD admitted on Reddit that it is dealing with an infinite-loop bug. Another company representative later said the team had submitted a low-risk fix and hoped to publish it "very soon". Adrenalin 26.10.2, released on 30 October, does not mention the change, and the same representative said the fix should land in the "next release". No official date has been given.

Workarounds

You can check whether you are affected in Resource Monitor: open the Disk tab and watch whether atieclxx.exe writes data continuously. Stopping the service in services.msc halts the process, but it may break FreeSync and Adrenalin hotkeys. Disabling Resizable BAR also helps, though it can reduce gaming performance.