AMD Admits a Radeon Driver Bug Keeps Writing to SSDs. A Fix Is Coming, but There’s No Date Yet
If you run a Radeon card, your SSD might be busy even when your PC is doing nothing. AMD has acknowledged a bug in its Radeon driver software that keeps writing data to the system drive around the clock on some PCs. It says a fix is coming. It hasn’t shipped yet.
What’s happening
The culprit is the AMD External Events Utility, a background service installed with Radeon drivers. It handles display jobs such as monitor detection and Radeon Software hotkeys. Its client process, atieclxx.exe, is the one users caught writing to their drives nonstop, VideoCardz reports.
The issue got fresh attention on November 8, when a Reddit post collected the reports, according to Tom’s Hardware. Users describe idle writes of about 0.3 to 1.5 MB/s, and one reported sustained writes of about 5 MB/s.
What AMD has said
- October 21, AMD community forum: a company representative confirmed AMD was investigating, with the aim of fixing it in a future driver release (via Tom’s Hardware).
- Later, on Reddit: AMD representative AMD_Vik said the problem appears to come from an interaction between the External Events Utility and Microsoft’s PCIe filter driver, and that a fix had been submitted. According to VideoCardz, he said Adrenalin 26.11.1 should resolve it.
- Timing: that driver is expected later in November, but AMD hasn’t given a release date. AMD’s latest release notes, published October 30, don’t mention the issue.
How bad is it for your SSD?
The numbers look big on paper. At a constant 5 MB/s, a drive would take about 18GB of writes an hour, 432GB a day and close to 13TB a month. Those are theoretical totals for the worst reported case, though. They are host writes, not necessarily writes to the flash itself: SSD controllers cache and spread out incoming data, so how much of it turns into real wear isn’t known.
One Radeon owner says the driver cost their SSD about 1% of its reported health every month for 16 months. That claim hasn’t been independently confirmed. The bug also doesn’t hit every Radeon system, and Notebookcheck notes that the real effect on drive lifespan is unclear.
Check your PC in a minute
- Press Win + R, type
resmonand press Enter. - Open the Disk tab and sort by Write (B/sec).
- Leave the PC idle for a minute and look for steady writes from
atieclxx.exeoratiesrxx.exe.
If you see them, users report two stopgaps. Neither works in every case, and neither comes from AMD as an official fix:
- Stop the service: open
services.msc, find AMD External Events Utility, and stop it or set it to Disabled. This can break Adrenalin hotkeys and some display features. - Turn off Resizable BAR in the BIOS. Some users say this stopped the writes, but it can cost gaming performance.
PCGeek’s take
Check before you panic. At the low end of the reports, around 1 MB/s, the writes add up to roughly 2.6TB a month. That’s annoying, but most modern drives can take years of it. Even the worst reported case, about 13TB a month, would take close to four years to use up a 600TBW rating, which is typical of many 1TB drives. The real problem is that a display helper has no business hammering your SSD at all. That AMD only acknowledged it on a forum and Reddit, with no date for the fix, isn’t great either.
If resmon shows the writes, stopping the service is the lighter fix for most people, unless you rely on Adrenalin hotkeys. Then install 26.11.1 when it lands and check again. We’ll update this post when AMD ships it.
Photo: Radeon RX 7900 XT by Shinobara, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0. File photo; not a specific affected system.
Have you checked your Radeon PC? Tell us what resmon showed in the comments.
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