AMD Radeon Driver SSD Write Bug: How to Check and What It Costs

AMD says Adrenalin 26.11.1 will fix a Radeon driver service that keeps writing to the system drive. Here is how to check your PC and how much wear it really adds.

AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT graphics card, product image from AMD
Image: AMD, Radeon RX 9070 XT product page. Shown for illustration: the bug is in the driver software, not one card.

A background service installed with AMD’s Windows drivers can write to the system drive around the clock on some PCs, and AMD expects the fix to arrive in Adrenalin 26.11.1. That release had not appeared on AMD’s release notes pages when GTR checked on 11 November. The bug is real, but on most affected PCs the wear is far smaller than the “432GB a day” figure doing the rounds, unless the drive is a budget QLC model.

The writes come from the AMD External Events Utility service, which runs as atieclxx.exe (Client Module) and atiesrxx.exe (Service Module). The service handles monitor detection, Radeon Software hotkeys and parts of FreeSync. Users report it writing log files to Windows\System32\AMD\EEUDumps\ at 0.3 to 5MB/s while the PC sits idle. Complaints grew after Adrenalin 26.10.1 and 26.10.2, but reports go back more than a year, and some Radeon owners see no unusual activity at all.

AMD points to an interaction with a Windows driver

Two AMD community representatives have responded. AMD_Matt said on AMD’s community forum on 21 October that the company was looking into the reports. AMD_Vik later wrote on Reddit that the problem appears to come from an interaction between the External Events Utility and Microsoft’s PCIe filter driver, and that a fix had been submitted for validation. VideoCardz reports that AMD is targeting Adrenalin 26.11.1 for it.

Those are community posts, not release notes. AMD’s notes for Adrenalin 26.10.2 list neither the bug nor a fix, and AMD has given 26.11.1 no date.

Check your PC in two minutes

  1. Press Win+R, type resmon and open the Disk tab in Resource Monitor. Sort “Processes with Disk Activity” by Write (B/sec) and leave the PC idle for a minute.
  2. If atieclxx.exe or atiesrxx.exe stays near the top with a steady write rate, your system has the bug. Note the figure: it decides how much the bug costs you.
  3. For the full picture, write down Total Host Writes in CrystalDiskInfo or your SSD maker’s tool and check it again a day later. The difference is everything your PC wrote that day, normal use included.

Run the check even without a Radeon card. The same service ships with AMD’s chipset software, and in 2025 a Ryzen owner with a GeForce card traced hundreds of EEUDumps writes per window move to it.

The 432GB-a-day figure is the worst case

That number assumes the fastest reported rate on a PC that never sleeps. GTR ran the same arithmetic for the whole range reported by users against two common 1TB drives: Samsung’s 990 EVO Plus, rated for 600TBW, and Crucial’s P3 Plus, a QLC drive rated for 220TBW. Both carry five-year warranties.

Write rate Per day, always on 5 years, always on Share of 600TBW Share of 220TBW
0.3MB/s 26GB 47TB 8% 22%
0.6MB/s 52GB 95TB 16% 43%
1.5MB/s 130GB 237TB 39% 108%
5MB/s 432GB 788TB 131% 358%

A PC that runs eight hours a day writes a third of these totals. The more useful number is the wait for the fix: three weeks at 1.5MB/s around the clock adds about 2.7TB, under half a percent of a 600TBW rating and about 1.2% of a 220TBW one. The math also fits the Reddit post, cited by Tom’s Hardware, from an owner whose drive lost about 1% of health a month for 16 months: on a 220TBW drive, that would take roughly 0.85MB/s around the clock.

These are host writes as Windows counts them. How many reach the flash itself depends on the drive’s controller and caching, so the table is a guide to scale, not a measured wear rate.

Three ways to handle it until 26.11.1

  • Wait. On a TLC drive with a low rate in Resource Monitor, this is the sensible choice: install 26.11.1 when it arrives and check its release notes for the fix.
  • Stop the service. In services.msc, stop AMD External Events Utility and set Startup type to Disabled. Users say this stops the writes, but Adrenalin hotkeys, monitor detection and some FreeSync behavior can suffer. Set it back to Automatic after updating. This is the option worth taking on a QLC drive or at rates above 1MB/s.
  • Turn off Resizable BAR in the BIOS. Some users say this stops the writes, but it can cost frame rate in games that benefit from it, and it does not help on every system.

Rolling back to an older driver is no clean fix, since the reports span many releases. Linux players can skip all of this: Adrenalin and the External Events Utility are Windows software, and Radeon cards on Linux run on the kernel’s amdgpu driver with Mesa.

Sources: AMD’s Adrenalin 26.10.2 release notes; VideoCardz on AMD’s community statements and the planned fix; TechSpot on the log folder, the service’s functions and reported write rates. Tom’s Hardware reported the SSD health claim and the 2025 chipset case. Endurance figures are from Samsung’s and Crucial’s specifications. Write totals calculated by GTR.