AMD users are reporting a misfiring utility is eating SSD health by 1% a month. AMD says a fix is on the way for its GPU drivers

by · PC Gamer

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I fear opening the Pandora's box that is my SSD's health report. I'd much rather live in ignorance until the day it inevitably fails on me. Some eagle-eyed AMD GPU users, however, have spotted their own SSD health dropping much faster than they expected, and have placed the blame squarely on an AMD Adrenalin driver utility.

Redditor Darklinkpower has flagged the issue on the r/pcmasterrace subbreddit. "I just found out that the driver eats up 1% of my SSD health every month for 16 month," says the redditor, "where[as another] user reported losing approximately 1% of their SSD health every month."

PSA: As of the latest AMD Adrenaline update, a bug may be causing silent, constant writes to your SSD, unnecessarily killing its lifespan. from r/pcmasterrace

The reports come from multiple sources, including the Radeon subreddit, and Tomasz Gawroński on X, who says that Adrenalin driver utility atieclxx.exe had performed 19.5 GB of I/O writes on their machine in just 12 hours. According to Gawroński, the bug has been present since Adrenalin Edition 26.7.1 released in June of this year.

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The issue doesn't appear to be present on all machines, and our own AMD GPU-using Jacob Fox hasn't been able to reproduce it. Still, the reports are numerous enough to suggest something is amiss.

In terms of an official response, representative AMD_Matt on the AMD community forums replied to a user flagging the issue last month, saying "We're looking into it with the aim to resolve it in a future driver release." Another AMD representative on Reddit, AMD_Vik, confirmed the disk write issue "should be fixed" in Adrenalin 26.11.1, although no exact release date has been given beyond its expected arrival later this month.

It seems that AMD is well aware of its misfiring utility, so hopefully the fix is on its way. After all, SSDs are bloomin' expensive at the moment, so I, along with the rest of the PC gaming community, are likely going to be eeking out the ones we've got for some time to come.

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