SSD Killer! AMD Radeon Drive Backstage Write Hard Drives: Up to 432GB per day

Fast Technology reported on November 9 that the AMD Radeon graphics driver was exposed to an abnormal bug: even if the system is completely idle, the background will continue to write data to the SSD. AMD has officially acknowledged the issue and a fix is in development.

The source of the problem points to the atieclxx.exe process in the AMD External Events Utility service. The process was originally responsible for basic functions such as monitor detection and FreeSync control, but now it has become the "culprit" of continuous writing. Users report write speeds between 0.7 and 5MB/s, with individual extremes even higher.

According to the continuous write calculation of 5MB/s, the theoretical write amount of the affected system can reach 432GB per day, which is close to 13TB per month. However, it should be noted that these data are assumed to be written uninterruptedly and not necessarily all to NAND flash. There is currently insufficient evidence to show how quickly the bug will consume SSD life.

Even more subtle is that such writes are barely perceived. Unless the resource monitor is proactively turned on, it is difficult for the user to notice the continuous disk activity in the background. Some users have reported indirect symptoms such as game stuttering, slow loading, but some Radeon systems are completely unaffected.

Provisional options exist, but at a cost. The AMD External Events Utility can be disabled through services.msc to stop abnormal writes, but it will also affect the FreeSync and Adrenalin shortcuts. Disabling Resizable bar is another idea at the cost of impaired gaming performance. It is not recommended to change the setting rashly before confirming that you have won the trick.

AMD representatives confirmed the issue in October, with additional news that the fix code has been submitted but may have missed the latest driver release window. It is expected that the fix will be officially launched with the release of Adrenalin 26.11.1 in November. Until then, Radeon users may want to open the Resource Monitor to take a look at disk writes to see if they are “being written to disk”.

Source: MyDrivers (Fast Technology). Content is presented with source attribution. Read the original report.