AMD Radeon driver bug may wear out SSDs with constant background writes

A bug in AMD's Radeon graphics drivers is causing continuous background writes to SSDs on some PCs, potentially shortening their lifespan, according to a report by Chinese technology outlet IT Home.

The issue involves AMD External Events Utility, a component of the company's graphics software. Its atieclxx.exe process repeatedly writes data to the system drive, even when the computer is idle.

Users have reported sustained write speeds ranging from 0.3 MB/s to 5 MB/s. At the highest reported rate, the process could generate as much as 432 GB of writes in a single day.

The unnecessary activity could accelerate SSD wear, particularly on lower-capacity budget drives using QLC flash memory. The actual impact on drive lifespan has not yet been established.

AMD representatives have acknowledged the issue, which appears to involve an interaction between AMD External Events Utility and Microsoft's PCIe filter driver.

Some users have temporarily stopped the writes by disabling the affected service or turning off Resizable BAR in the BIOS. However, these workarounds can interfere with features such as FreeSync or reduce gaming performance.

AMD is working on a fix that has reportedly been submitted for testing. The company hopes to include it in an upcoming driver update, although no release date has been confirmed.