AMD says a Radeon driver fix is coming for nonstop SSD writes. Check your PC with Resource Monitor first.

Radeon owners report AMD's External Events Utility writing to the system drive around the clock, up to about 5 MB/s at idle. AMD representatives say they are looking into it and hope the next driver fixes it. How to check your PC in two minutes, and the two workarounds with their costs.

If your PC has an AMD Radeon graphics card, spend two minutes checking whether its driver is writing to your SSD nonstop. Radeon owners report that AMD’s External Events Utility keeps writing to the system drive even when the PC sits idle, and AMD representatives say a fix should come in a coming driver release.

What AMD has said

The External Events Utility installs with Radeon’s Adrenalin driver. It runs as a Windows service and handles display events such as monitor detection, display hotkeys and FreeSync, according to Notebookcheck.

AMD has acknowledged the problem twice, according to Tom’s Hardware. On October 21, a company representative on AMD’s community forum wrote: “Yes. We’re looking into it with the aim to resolve it in a future driver release.” A second AMD representative later said on Reddit that it is “hopefully fixed in the next one.”

Notebookcheck reports that an AMD representative on Reddit tied the writes to an interaction between the utility and Microsoft’s PCIe filter driver, and said a potential fix had been submitted for final validation. AMD has not given a release date. Its October 30 release notes for Adrenalin 26.20.2 do not mention the issue, Tom’s Hardware says.

What owners are reporting

The reports come from users, and none of the numbers below are independently confirmed.

• One user measured sustained writes of about 5 MB/s with the PC idle. Others put it near 1 MB/s.
• At 5 MB/s, that adds up to about 432 GB a day and close to 13 TB a month of host writes.
• One owner said the drive’s reported health fell about 1% a month for 16 months.
• Reports include Adrenalin 26.19.2 and older releases, so it is not limited to the newest driver.

Host writes are not the same as wear on the flash chips. SSD controllers cache and spread writes, and Tom’s Hardware notes that how much of this reaches the NAND is unknown.

Check before you change anything

1. Press Win + R, type resmon and press Enter.
2. Open the Disk tab and sort the processes by write bytes.
3. Look for steady writes from atieclxx.exe or atiesrxx.exe, the External Events processes. Watch for a minute with the PC idle.

If you see a few short bursts, leave it alone and wait for AMD’s driver. If those processes write megabytes every second with nothing open, you have the bug. A free tool such as CrystalDiskInfo shows your drive’s health and total host writes, so you can compare it again in a week.

Both workarounds cost you something

Users report two ways to stop the writes. Neither is clean.

1. Disable the service. Press Win + R, type services.msc, find AMD External Events Utility, stop it and set its startup type to Disabled. Users say this stops the writes. Notebookcheck reports it can break Adrenalin’s hotkeys.
2. Turn off Resizable BAR in your BIOS. One user reported it stopped the disk activity without touching the service, and AMD reportedly suggested it too. Resizable BAR lets the CPU reach the graphics card’s memory more efficiently, so turning it off can cost you frame rate in games.

Our read: for a work PC that mostly runs office apps and a browser, option 1 is the cheaper trade until the fix ships. Set a reminder to switch the service back on after you install the next Adrenalin driver, then check Resource Monitor again. A gaming PC should keep Resizable BAR on and use option 1 as well.