The SSD is one part of a PC that usually minds its own business. But new information suggests some AMD Radeon drivers are putting unnecessary stress on it. The bigger problem, however, is the reduced SSD lifespan from that stress.
AMD has acknowledged on Reddit that a Radeon driver bug (an infinite loop in technical terms) keeps the SSD busy even when the PC is idle. The culprit is a driver that handles hotkeys and FreeSync called AMD External Events Utility (atieclxx.exe).
What is the bug, and who is affected?
Users caught the tool constantly writing data to their SSDs at around 0.3 to 1.5 MB/s on most PCs, or as high as 5 MB/s in the worst report. This data mainly consists of internal driver diagnostics, status checks, and system event logs.
That might sound negligible at first, but 0.3 MB/s adds up to roughly 26 GB a day. At 5 MB/s, the total jumps to about 432 GB a day, or nearly 13 TB a month. That’s a ridiculous amount of activity for a PC that’s supposed to be doing absolutely nothing.
On an average 500GB SSD rated for around 300 TBW, that’s equivalent to 3.16% to 52.56% of its total rated write endurance per year, depending on the write speed. In simpler terms, the bug is forcing your SSD to do a lot of work that isn’t even related to what you’re using it for.
Ideally, a driver shouldn’t be writing data to your SSD while your PC is idle, especially when there’s no apparent reason for it. On the flip side, those figures count what Windows sends to the drive, not what physically lands on the flash chips. So, the lifespan loss isn’t proven (yet).
Has AMD fixed it, and what can you do in the meantime?
An AMD rep, AMD_Matt, acknowledged the problem in October. Another, AMD_Vik, later said a colleague had submitted a low-risk fix, and he hoped to ship it “very soon.”
Yet Adrenalin 26.10.2, released October 30, doesn’t mention it, and Vik told a user asking about that version he thinks the fix lands in “the very next one.” There’s no official date, though.
To check whether the issue impacts your PC, open Resource Monitor (press Win + R, type resmon, pick the Disk tab) and look for atieclxx.exe writing steadily. If it is, you have two workarounds. However, none of them solve the issue unconditionally.
Stopping the service in services.msc pauses the driver but can break FreeSync behavior and Adrenalin hotkeys. Meanwhile, if you turn off Resizable BAR, it stops them but might reduce gaming performance.
My advice, in this case, would be not to touch anything unless you’ve confirmed the writes.