AMD Radeon driver bug may be writing to your SSD nonstop, with a workaround

[Doctor_Cena29]

Radeon owners may want to check whether their drivers are wearing down their SSD. Tom's Hardware reports that AMD's External Events Utility, installed with Radeon drivers, is reported to write about 5MB per second even when the PC is idle

That adds up to roughly 18GB an hour, 432GB a day and about 13TB a month. One Reddit user claims it used 1 percent of SSD health every month for 16 months, though other users report much lower rates

Affected reports include Adrenalin 26.19.2 and older, and the release notes for 26.20.2 on 30 October do not mention the problem. An AMD representative said on 21 October that the company is looking into it with the aim of resolving it in a future driver release

To check, open Resource Monitor, go to the Disk tab and sort by writes, looking for atieclxx.exe and atiesrxx.exe. A workaround is to stop the AMD EEU service in services.msc or set it to Disabled, and some users say disabling ReBAR also works, although that costs gaming performance and host writes do not equal actual NAND wear

Constant background writes are worth checking, because SSDs have a limited write endurance. The Resource Monitor check takes only a minute and will show whether your system is affected. Disabling the service is an easy fix until AMD releases a proper update

Have you checked your SSD write activity? And do you keep an eye on your drive health?

AMD admits GPU driver bug is writing data continuously, wearing out SSDs - Radeon owner claims External Events Utility used up 1% of SSD health every month for over a year, company promises a fix soonwww.tomshardware.com

[JohnyBlue]

AMD saying hopefully fixed in the next driver is not reassuring. Weeks have passed already. Users should apply the workaround now

[TaxSeason]

Thirteen terabytes a month from an idle utility is absurd. That is more than most people write in a year. Checking my PC tonight. Check yours