An AMD Radeon Driver Bug Can Keep Writing to Your SSD. Here’s How to Check

If you game on a Radeon card, a small background service in AMD’s driver may be writing to your SSD all day, even while your PC sits idle. AMD has acknowledged the bug, and a fix is due in its next driver. Until then, it takes a minute to see whether yours is doing it.

What’s going on?

The AMD External Events Utility is a background service that comes with AMD’s Adrenalin driver. It handles small display jobs behind the scenes, and on some PCs it never stops writing to the Windows drive. Users noticed it as constant disk activity with nothing running.

How much depends on the PC. Some users have seen around 5 MB/s, others far less. One developer dug into it on their own PC and found something odd: the service copies its own file, about 660 KB, into a Windows system folder every second. Every second, all day. On a PC that never switches off, that’s about 56 GB a day. Users flagged it on Reddit and AMD’s forums, and ComputerBase reported it on November 9.

Some Reddit users say their SSD’s health reading has been dropping about 1% a month. That’s their reading, but it lines up with the higher rates.

Is AMD fixing it?

Yes. In October, an AMD representative on its forums said the company was looking into it “with the aim to resolve it in a future driver release.” Now there’s a version number. Another AMD representative, on Reddit, has pointed to Adrenalin 26.11.1 for the fix, due later this month.

That driver isn’t out yet. The current one is Adrenalin 26.10.2, and nothing in its release notes mentions the bug. When 26.11.1 lands, look for the fix in its changelog before you undo any workaround.

How do you check if your PC has it?

It takes about a minute. Press Win+R, type resmon and press Enter to open Resource Monitor. On the Disk tab, look for atieclxx.exe in the list of processes. Leave the PC alone for a bit and watch its Write column. Steady activity with nothing running means you’re affected. If it barely shows up, you’re not.

How much does it actually wear your SSD?

Less than the headlines suggest, unless you’re at the top of that range. SSDs are rated for a total amount of data written, called TBW, short for terabytes written. A typical 1TB drive is rated somewhere around 600TB.

Left on around the clock at 56 GB a day, the bug adds about 20TB a year, a few percent of that rating. At 5 MB/s, it’s about 158TB a year, roughly a quarter of it. If your PC is off part of the day, it’s less. It’s a slow leak. A small, cheap drive at the high end is the one to worry about. Your drive’s maker lists its TBW rating, so check yours against what Resource Monitor shows.

What can you do until the fix?

There are two stopgaps, and neither is free.

You can disable the service. Press Win+R, type services.msc, find AMD External Events Utility, stop it and set its startup type to Disabled. That stops it, but it can affect FreeSync, frame pacing and Adrenalin’s hotkeys.

Or you can turn off Resizable BAR in your BIOS. It’s a setting that lets the processor reach all of the graphics card’s memory at once, and some games run faster with it on. Turning it off has stopped the writes for some people, and it costs you that speed.

There’s also an unofficial tool from an independent developer that blocks just the repeated copy while leaving the service running. It isn’t from AMD, and it’s in German. For most people, waiting for 26.11.1 is the safer call.

What about AMD handhelds and Ryzen PCs?

None of the reports so far mention a handheld. AMD’s Adrenalin driver doesn’t support handheld gaming PCs, which get their graphics drivers from the device maker instead. If you have one, the same Resource Monitor check will tell you in a minute.

If you have an AMD processor with an Nvidia or Intel graphics card, it’s worth a look too. ComputerBase points out the same service has turned up on PCs with AMD chipsets and no Radeon card. AMD’s chipset driver had similar complaints about a year ago.