AMD has confirmed it is investigating an AMD driver bug that Radeon owners say is writing data to their system drives almost without pause, even when their computers are sitting idle. The software at the centre of the reports is AMD’s External Events Utility, or EEU, a component installed alongside the company’s graphics drivers, according to reporting by Tom’s Hardware.
The complaints gathered fresh momentum on November 8, when a user posting under the handle ‘darklinkpower’ pulled together reports of the unusual drive activity. AMD had already responded to the issue in its community forum in October, and a second company representative has since said a fix may arrive in the next driver release.
The AMD driver bug behind constant idle writes
An SSD normally does very little when a PC is left alone. On some Radeon systems, Tom’s Hardware reports, that does not appear to be the case: the EEU may be writing data to the system drive continuously, even when the machine is barely being used.
One Radeon owner said the behaviour had been eroding their drive’s reported health for more than a year. “I just found out that the driver eats up 1% of my SSD health every month for 16 months,” the user wrote. Another reported sustained writes of roughly 5MB/s while the PC was idle, and a further user also described SSD health dropping by about 1% each month across a 16-month span.
AMD confirms it is looking into the problem
AMD has acknowledged the issue. In an October 21 response on the company’s community forum, a representative said the matter was under investigation.
“Yes. We’re looking into it with the aim to resolve it in a future driver release.”
A second representative, identified as AMAD Vik, later offered a more upbeat assessment, apologising and saying: “This is hopefully fixed in the next one.” As Tom’s Hardware notes, AMD has indicated a fix is in the works but has not published a confirmed release date. More coverage of PC hardware issues is collected in our News section.
What 5MB/s of writes adds up to
The arithmetic is worth spelling out. At 5MB/s, an SSD would take on roughly 18GB of host writes per hour. Over a full day that works out to about 432GB, and a month of uninterrupted activity could push the total close to 13TB.
Those figures do not translate directly into damage to the flash itself, however. SSD controllers use caching, wear-levelling and other techniques to manage incoming data, and Tom’s Hardware says it remains unknown how much of the reported activity ends up written to the NAND. The outlet also cautions that the user’s claim of losing 1% of drive health each month has not been independently confirmed.
Reports span several Adrenalin releases
There is no obvious pattern tying the behaviour to a single driver version. Affected systems include machines running Adrenalin 26.19.2 as well as older releases, which suggests the problem is not confined to the newest update. AMD’s October 30 release notes for Adrenalin 26.20.2 make no mention of the issue.
For now, Tom’s Hardware says it is difficult to pin down which driver versions, hardware combinations or system configurations are responsible for the writes.
This is not the first time the EEU has drawn scrutiny. In November last year, a similar complaint surfaced around AMD chipset drivers, after a user said they had found the software repeatedly updating a log file whenever on-screen elements were moved or resized. That episode also raised questions about whether stopping the service would affect FreeSync. The current reports are a different matter, with some users describing writes that barely let up while their PCs do nothing at all.
Two workarounds, both with drawbacks
Two workarounds have been reported, and neither is a clean fix.
- Stop or disable the service. Press Win + R, enter services.msc, and locate AMD EEU. The service can then be stopped, or its startup type changed to Disabled. Tom’s Hardware says this appears to stop the excessive writes but is not necessarily a tidy solution.
- Turn off Resizable BAR. One user reported that disabling ReBAR halted the disk activity without touching the EEU. That carries a cost too, since ReBAR can improve gaming performance by letting the PC access the GPU’s memory more efficiently.
How to check your own drive activity
Before changing driver services or BIOS settings, Tom’s Hardware suggests confirming whether the behaviour is present at all. Open Windows Resource Monitor by pressing Win + R and typing resmon, then select the Disk tab. Sorting by write activity and watching for sustained writes from atieclxx.exe or atiesrxx.exe will show whether the processes tied to Radeon drivers are responsible. Our Reviews section covers storage and graphics hardware in more depth.
With no firm date attached to a patch for the AMD driver bug, the outlet’s advice to Radeon owners is to monitor storage activity rather than immediately disabling driver services or altering BIOS settings. The report was also syndicated by tech.yahoo.com.
Until AMD ships a correction, the scope of the issue remains unsettled: the External Events Utility is confirmed by AMD to be under investigation, but how many drives have been measurably worn by the AMD driver bug, and by how much, has not been established.
