AMD has acknowledged a Radeon software bug that keeps writing to SSDs while affected PCs sit idle, giving storage an entirely pointless workout.
According to Tom’s Hardware, AMD’s External Events Utility, which comes with Radeon drivers and handles display functions.
Some owners have measured sustained writes reaching 5MB/s. That would produce about 432GB of host writes a day if it continued uninterrupted.
A month at that rate approaches 13TB. It is an impressive amount of work for software supposedly waiting for something to happen on a display.
One owner claimed their SSD’s reported health had fallen by one percentage point each month for 16 months. That claim has not been independently verified.
Host write traffic cannot establish exactly how much NAND wear occurred. The controller’s handling of those writes, and the drive’s endurance, both affect the outcome.
AMD had already acknowledged an investigation in October. The renewed reports suggest the problem has survived long enough to become more than an obscure annoyance.
AMD representatives now expect Adrenalin 26.11.1 to contain a fix, following work on an interaction with Microsoft’s PCIe filter driver.
The fault appears uneven. Owners running similar software report different behaviour, so having a Radeon card does not establish that a machine is affected.
Windows Resource Monitor can show sustained disk writes associated with atieclxx.exe. Checking an idle machine should help distinguish the problem from normal application activity.
Users have reported stopping the utility or disabling Resizable BAR as temporary workarounds. Those changes can interfere with display functions or reduce gaming performance.
AMD’s software should manage the graphics card without spending the SSD’s write endurance on unexplained background activity. Owners deserve a clear description of affected configurations. The planned driver fix has no confirmed release date. AMD representatives expect it later in November.
