Your SSD normally works in the background without any trouble. New reports show that some AMD Radeon drivers keep it busy for no reason, and the real cost is a shorter SSD lifespan.
AMD confirmed on Reddit that a bug in its Radeon driver causes an infinite loop. The loop keeps writing to your SSD even when your PC sits idle. The problem comes from the AMD External Events Utility (atieclxx.exe), a driver component that handles hotkeys and FreeSync.
Who does the AMD Radeon driver SSD bug affect?
Users found that the tool keeps writing data to their SSDs at around 0.3 to 1.5 MB/s on most PCs. The worst report reached 5 MB/s. The data is mostly internal driver diagnostics, status checks, and system event logs.
That rate looks small, but it adds up. At 0.3 MB/s, you get about 26 GB of writes per day. At 5 MB/s, that grows to roughly 432 GB per day, or nearly 13 TB per month. That is a lot of activity for a PC that is supposed to be sitting idle.
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Take a typical 500GB SSD rated for 300 TBW. Depending on the write speed, this bug uses between 3.16% and 52.56% of that rated endurance every year. To simplify it, your SSD does a lot of work that has nothing to do with what you are using it for.
A driver should not write to your SSD while your PC idles, especially without a clear reason. One caveat applies, though. These figures measure what Windows sends to the drive, not what physically reaches the flash chips. So no one has proven the lifespan loss yet.
Is there any fix for the AMD Radeon driver SSD bug?
AMD acknowledged the problem in October. An AMD rep named AMD_Matt confirmed it first. Later, another rep, AMD_Vik, said a colleague had submitted a low-risk fix and that he hoped to ship it “very soon.”
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Adrenalin 26.10.2 came out on October 30, but its notes do not mention the fix. When a user asked about that version, Vik said he expects the fix in “the very next one.” AMD has not given an official date.
You can check whether your PC is affected. Press Win + R, type resmon, and open the Disk tab. Look for atieclxx.exe and see if it writes to your drive at a steady rate.
If it does, you have two workarounds. Neither one fixes the problem in every case.
- Stop the service in services.msc. This pauses the driver, but it can break FreeSync behavior and Adrenalin hotkeys.
- Turn off Resizable BAR. This also stops the writes, but it may lower your gaming performance.
Do not change anything unless you have confirmed the writes on your own PC.
