THE CRUNCH

AMD has acknowledged reports that its External Events Utility, a component installed alongside Radeon drivers, may be writing data to the system drive continuously, even when the PC is barely being used. The issue drew fresh attention on November 8 when a Reddit user highlighted the unusual drive activity. One Radeon owner claimed the problem had eaten 1% of their SSD's reported health every month for 16 months, while another reported sustained writes of roughly 5MB/s while the machine sat idle. A company representative confirmed on AMD's community forum in October that the issue was under investigation, and another AMD representative later apologised on Reddit, saying it was hopefully fixed in the next driver release.

The reported write rate adds up quickly: at 5MB/s, an SSD would receive about 432GB of writes per day, close to 13TB over a month. That does not necessarily mean the data reaches the NAND flash itself, since SSD controllers use caching and wear-leveling to manage incoming data, so how much of the activity translates into actual flash wear is still unknown. The 1%-a-month health claim has not been independently confirmed either.

There is no clear pattern across driver versions, with reports spanning Adrenalin 26.19.2 and older releases, and AMD's October 30 release notes for Adrenalin 26.20.2 do not mention the issue. This is not the utility's first appearance either: last November, a similar complaint involved AMD chipset drivers repeatedly updating a log file whenever on-screen elements were moved or resized.

Two workarounds have been reported. Stopping or disabling the AMD EEU service in Windows Services appears to halt the excessive writes, though it is not a clean solution. Disabling Resizable BAR reportedly stopped the disk activity without touching the service, but ReBAR can improve gaming performance, so that trade-off is not ideal either.

For now, the sensible first step is to check whether the problem exists at all. Windows Resource Monitor's Disk tab, reachable by typing resmon into the Run dialog, will show sustained writes from atieclxx.exe or atiesrxx.exe if the bug is active on your system.

Key dates

SSD write bug timeline

  1. October 30

    Adrenalin 26.20.2 release notes do not mention the issue

  2. November 8

    Reddit user highlights the unusual drive activity

Dates from Tom's Hardware, as quoted in this brief.

Since this brief

  1. 13 Nov

    AMD ships optional driver fix for SSD-wearing Radeon bug

Crunchy Tech briefs on this story.

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT

AMD has not published a confirmed release date for the fix, so Radeon owners should watch upcoming Adrenalin driver release notes and monitor storage activity in the meantime.