AMD Investigates Radeon Driver Bug Causing SSD Background Writes
AMD is investigating a persistent background drive-writing bug in its Radeon graphics card drivers that causes continuous data writes to solid-state drives even when systems sit idle, Wccftech reported.
The background write activity stems from the AMD External Events Utility and involves the Windows background process atieclxx.exe. Users have observed the utility logging write speeds of several megabytes per second onto system storage without any active gaming or heavy workloads running.
The issue affects multiple Radeon graphics cards and various Adrenalin driver versions. According to Wccftech, the core service handles display changes, monitor shortcuts, and FreeSync event processing, but interacts abnormally with the Windows PCIe Filter Driver to trigger unnecessary disk activity.
If you have an AMD Radeon GPU, your driver might be writing to your SSD nonstop, even while your PC is idle Someone measured about 5 MB/s… Left running all day, that could be up to 432 GB of writes AMD says it's a real bug. Via @wccftech pic.twitter.com/3buKANFFY9
AMD is reviewing the flaw. AMD representative AMD_Matt acknowledged the problem in October 2026, confirming that the company launched an investigation. Another representative, AMD_Vik, later stated that a fix had likely been submitted for internal validation but missed the deployment window for a subsequent driver release.
The company released Adrenalin Edition 26.10.2 on October 30, 2026, to address system crashes and driver timeouts on Radeon RX 7000 and RX 9000 series cards, but omitted any mention of the SSD write glitch from its official release notes. No official driver patch has been issued yet.
While Windows reports heavy host-side writes, modern SSD caching and write management layers mean the reported volume does not necessarily translate to direct wear on underlying NAND flash memory.
Users seeking an immediate workaround can open the Windows services manager via services.msc to disable the AMD External Events Utility or turn off Resizable BAR in their motherboard BIOS. These temporary fixes carry trade-offs, as disabling the service can disable display shortcuts and FreeSync, while altering BIOS settings may reduce gaming performance.