If you use a Radeon graphics card on Windows, your SSD may be getting written to all day for no reason. Users report that a process belonging to AMD’s graphics driver keeps writing to the system drive even when the PC is idle, and AMD staff have confirmed it is a real bug.
The process is atieclxx.exe, part of AMD External Events Utility. The complaint resurfaced in a Reddit post by darklinkpower. One person measured about 5 MB/s of constant writing; other reports are much lower, from roughly a third of a megabyte to one and a half per second. Users on Windows 10 and Windows 11, with different Radeon cards and several Adrenalin versions, describe the same behaviour.
An AMD representative going by AMD_Matt acknowledged the problem in October and said the company was looking into it. Later, a colleague, AMD_Vik, suggested the fix was probably already committed but may have missed the deadline for the next driver. Adrenalin Edition 26.10.2, released on 30 October, lists no such fix in its release notes.
How much harm this does is unclear. A steady 5 MB/s would add up to about 432 GB a day, or nearly 13 TB a month, but only if it never pauses, and that is host writes, not what actually lands on the flash chips. Nobody has shown that it shortens a drive’s life. Some Radeon owners also report normal disk activity on 26.10.2, so not every system is hit.
To see whether your PC does it, open Resource Monitor by typing resmon into the Run box (Win+R), go to the Disk tab and sort by writes. Look for atieclxx.exe near the top. Some users stopped the writes by disabling AMD External Events Utility in services.msc, and others by turning off Resizable BAR. Each has a price: stopping the service can break FreeSync behaviour and Adrenalin hotkeys, and Resizable BAR can affect gaming performance. Unless you have seen the writes yourself, leave both alone and wait for the driver update.
AMD has not given a date for the fixed driver. For now the two things worth doing are checking Resource Monitor and watching the release notes of the next Adrenalin version for a line about External Events Utility or disk activity.
