TodayToday's edition
AMD confirmed a Radeon driver bug behind constant SSD writes, up to 5 MB/s in user reports, or about 432 GB a day if sustained. SSD wear is unproven and AMD has named no release date.
Chips & Power DeskEdited by Ege Erten
2 min readAI-assisted
A Radeon RX 9000 series card from AMD's product page. The photo is illustrative and does not show the driver component behind the reported SSD writes.
Image: AMD
Source · Press image from the AMD website, used for news reporting.
AMD has acknowledged a Radeon driver bug that causes constant SSD writes, with the system drive written to while a PC sits idle, and user reports of up to 5 MB/s would add up to about 432 GB a day, according to Notebookcheck, Wccftech and Digital Trends.
The writes come from the AMD External Events Utility, a background component that appears as atieclxx.exe and handles display events, hotkeys and FreeSync. Reported rates run from 0.3 MB/s to 1.5 MB/s on most PCs, with the worst single report near 5 MB/s, according to Digital Trends. Those rates come from Radeon users on Reddit, not from AMD or from the outlets' own testing. The 432 GB figure is arithmetic: 5 MB/s held for 24 hours. At 0.3 MB/s, Digital Trends puts the total near 26 GB a day.
AMD representatives have confirmed the problem on Reddit, per Digital Trends and Wccftech. A representative named AMD_Matt called it a genuine issue in October. Another, AMD_Vik, said a colleague had submitted a low-risk fix and hoped to ship it "very soon." Notebookcheck says the representative tied the bug to an interaction between the utility and Microsoft's PCIe filter driver, and that a fix was submitted for final validation.
Digital Trends calculates that 5 MB/s of constant writes equals 52.56% of a 300 TBW rating a year, against 3.16% at 0.3 MB/s; actual wear is unproven.
Illustration (AI-generated)
Whether this shortens drive life is not proven. Digital Trends notes that Windows reports what it sends to the drive, not what reaches the flash, and Wccftech says there is not enough evidence to judge the effect on endurance. Digital Trends calculates that on a 500 GB SSD rated for about 300 TB written, the range from 0.3 MB/s to 5 MB/s equals 3.16% to 52.56% of rated endurance a year. That is its estimate for a machine that writes continuously, not a measured loss. Small, low-endurance drives and always-on PCs are the cases to watch.
Not every Radeon system is affected, and some users see normal disk activity even on Adrenalin 26.10.2. The same behavior was seen earlier with AMD chipset drivers, Notebookcheck reports.
AMD's release notes for Adrenalin 26.10.2, posted on Oct. 30, do not mention the issue, and the notes page for 26.11.1 did not exist on Nov. 9. VideoCardz's headline says the fix is planned for Adrenalin 26.11.1, but AMD has given no release date in the material Voltgrid reviewed. Digital Trends quotes AMD_Vik saying he expects the fix in "the very next" driver. Voltgrid found no source showing that 26.11.1 has shipped.
Radeon owners can check for the problem in Resource Monitor by opening the Disk tab and looking for steady writes from atieclxx.exe. Stopping the service in Windows can halt the writes but may break FreeSync behavior and Adrenalin hotkeys, according to Digital Trends, so it is a stopgap rather than a fix. For the driver the bug sits in, see AMD's Adrenalin 26.10.2 fix list, as Voltgrid reported.
