AMD investigates Radeon utility causing continuous SSD writes

AMD Radeon users have reported continuous SSD writes while their computers are idle, with rates ranging from several hundred kilobytes to more than 1MB per second; some users measured about 5MB per second. The activity has been observed across multiple hardware generations. Users traced it to AMD External Events Utility, a background service running as `atieclxx.exe`. AMD engineers say the issue comes from an unintended interaction between the utility and Microsoft PCIe filter drivers.

At 5MB per second, the writes amount to about 432GB in 24 hours and could exceed 13TB over a month of continuous operation. The figures describe sustained activity, which the report notes is unlikely for typical consumer machines. Some users said drive-health utilities had raised endurance warnings, but the scale of any lasting SSD damage is not established.

Community workarounds indicate that temporarily disabling AMD External Events Utility stops the writes, though this may affect display features or secondary hotkeys. AMD says it is investigating and validating an internal hotfix, which it plans to include in an upcoming Adrenalin driver release.