The takeaway: Those with AMD CPUs or GPUs who notice that the company's graphics and chipset drivers access internal storage drives hundreds of times within a short period likely have nothing to worry about. Although investigations into the mysterious behavior have not uncovered its purpose, its impact on SSD lifespan is probably negligible compared to numerous other daily tasks.
Users with AMD chips who check log files within System32 might notice the constant modifications. The high rate of changes has sparked concern that the company's drivers are making excessive writes to SSDs, but whether users should be worried remains unclear.
Redditor Takia_Gecko recorded the behavior after highlighting prior investigations into the matter. As the video below shows, every time he moves or resizes a window, modifications appear in a log file located in C:\Windows\System32\AMD\EEDumps. However, the files do not appear on all devices with AMD components.
The logs drew attention because they indicate that a program might be writing to internal storage hundreds of times during a very brief period. Since SSDs can only write data a finite number of times before degrading, such behavior could theoretically shorten the lifespan.
Takia_Gecko proved that AMD drivers were the culprit by demonstrating that the writes cease upon disabling a service called AMD External Events Utility. On systems with AMD GPUs, the company's graphics drivers might be the cause, but the Redditor's PC uses an Nvidia GPU with an AMD CPU, leading him to suspect Team Red's chipset drivers.
A program for detecting the behavior is available on GitHub, and Takia_Gecko has devised a workaround for concerned users that redirects the written data away from internal storage. However, users should always exercise caution before altering a process that they do not fully understand.
Commentators suspect that the behavior is related to FreeSync, and stopping it might disrupt the feature. Other core GPU functions might also be impacted, such as user settings or attached devices.
Furthermore, the amount of data the drivers write to the log files may be far less than what other commonly used programs, such as web browsers or Windows Security. One commentator noticed that AMD drivers were writing to log files at a rate of slightly over 1MB/s, significantly less than that of random page file accesses.