What we know so far: AMD has officially confirmed that a bug in its Radeon GPU drivers triggers a silent background process that continuously writes data to the system drive, even when the PC is idle, accelerating SSD wear and potentially shortening the drive's lifespan. The company added that a permanent fix is currently being validated and will be rolled out as part of the next driver update, scheduled for later this month.
The problem, which affects only Windows PCs, has been reported by multiple users on social media, online message boards, and official AMD forums for years. Some users have complained that the excessive disk activity was reducing their SSD's lifespan by around 1% every month. One user even claimed that their PC lost as much as 16% of its SSD health in just over a year due to the bug.
– Tomasz Gawroński (@GawroskiT) November 9, 2026
AMD has acknowledged that the issue affects its External Events Utility service, which creates the "atieclxx.exe" process responsible for the continuous write activity. Official documentation reveals that the process handles several display-related functions for AMD GPUs, including monitor detection, FreeSync, and Radeon software hotkeys.
According to user reports, the buggy process writes data to log files stored on the system drive under Windows\System32\AMD\EEUDumps\, at speeds ranging from 0.3 MB/s to 5 MB/s. If this write activity continues indefinitely, it could potentially generate more than 400GB of data per day, or over 12TB per month, taking a considerable toll on consumer-grade SSDs.
Although reports of unusually high write activity have been circulating for at least a year and a half, the issue came to a head following last month's Adrenalin 26.10.1 and 26.10.2 GPU driver updates. The problem gained further attention after Redditor darklinkpower posted a series of possible workarounds users could try to temporarily mitigate the issue.
The most widely recommended workaround is to disable the External Events Utility service, although doing so also affects some display-related functionality. According to the Redditor, AMD FreeSync continues to work after disabling the service, but frame pacing could become significantly more erratic, particularly when using Lossless Scaling's 2x frame generation.
Thankfully, Radeon GPU users won't have to rely on temporary workarounds for much longer. Responding to a complaint on Reddit, AMD representative "Vik" confirmed that the problem stems from an erroneous interaction between the External Events Utility and Microsoft's PCIe filter driver. The company expects to roll out a fix with Adrenalin 26.11.1 before the end of this month.