AMD Acknowledges Radeon Driver Bug That May Write Continuously to SSDs

AMD has acknowledged reports that its External Events Utility, installed alongside Radeon drivers, may write data continuously to SSDs, even when a PC is idle. Some Radeon owners say the activity has reduced reported drive health, including one claim of about 1% per month for 16 months, while AMD says it is investigating and plans a fix in a future driver release.

What users reported

The issue drew renewed attention on November 8, when Reddit user 'darklinkpower' highlighted reports of unusual drive activity. One owner claimed the driver used about 1% of SSD health every month for 16 months. Another user reported sustained writes of approximately 5MB/s while their PC was idle, and another claimed SSD health dropped by about 1% every month for 16 months.

AMD response and possible impact

In an October 21 response on its community forum, an AMD representative confirmed the company was investigating and aimed to resolve the issue in a future driver release. Another representative, AMAD Vik, later said on Reddit that it is hopefully fixed in the next release. At 5 MB/s, an SSD would receive about 18GB of host writes per hour, 432GB over a full day, and close to 13TB over a month of uninterrupted activity. That does not necessarily mean the data is written to NAND flash itself, because SSD controllers use caching and wear leveling, so actual flash wear remains unknown. The user claim of losing 1% of drive health each month has not been independently confirmed.

Versions and workarounds

Reports include systems running Adrenalin 26.19.2 and older releases, so the problem may not be limited to the latest update. AMD's October 30 release notes for Adrenalin 26.20.2 do not mention the issue. Users can check for sustained writes from atieclxx.exe or atiesrxx.exe in Windows Resource Monitor. Two reported workarounds are stopping or disabling the AMD EEU service in Windows Services, or disabling Resizable Bar, though neither is ideal because stopping the service may not be a clean solution and ReBAR can improve gaming performance by allowing the PC to access GPU memory more efficiently. AMD has not published a confirmed release date for the fix.

Sources: Tom's Hardware