AMD Radeon Driver Writing to Your SSD All Day? How to Check Your SSD's Health and Stop It

If your PC has an AMD Radeon graphics card, a driver bug may be writing gigabytes of junk to your SSD every day - here is how to check in two minutes.

AMD has acknowledged the problem and says a fix is coming in a future driver.

Your SSD is not about to die, but it is worth a quick look - and while you are there, you can check how healthy the drive really is.

What the AMD Bug Does

A small background part of the Radeon driver, the AMD External Events Utility, keeps writing to your system drive even when the PC is doing nothing.

Its process is called atieclxx.exe.

Users report between about 0.3 and 1.5 MB every second, with a few seeing up to 5 MB. Over a day that adds up to roughly 26 to 130 GB of writes, and more on the worst machines.

• Who is affected. Several recent Adrenalin driver releases on Windows 10 and 11, across a range of Radeon cards - but not every PC shows it.
• What AMD says. An AMD representative blamed a clash between the utility and a Microsoft PCIe driver, and said a fix is in final testing - no release date has been given.

Check Whether It's Happening on Your PC

1. Open Resource Monitor. Press Win + R, type resmon and press Enter.
2. Go to the Disk tab. Click the Write (B/sec) column header to sort by what is writing the most.
3. Leave the PC idle for a minute. If atieclxx.exe keeps sitting near the top with steady writes, you have the bug.

Resource Monitor shows this more clearly than Task Manager. The same view is handy for any SSD that never seems to rest, whatever is causing it.

How to Stop It Until AMD's Fix Arrives

The simplest workaround is to switch off the service that does the writing.

1. Open Services. Press Win + R, type services.msc and press Enter.
2. Find the service. Scroll to AMD External Events Utility and double-click it.
3. Turn it off. Click Stop, set Startup type to Disabled, then click OK.

When AMD ships the fixed driver, install it from our AMD Radeon Adrenalin page, then set the service back to Automatic. Skip the forum tips about swapping system driver files - they are riskier than the bug.

How Worried Should You Be?

Not very. Many 1 TB SSDs are rated for around 600 TB of writes, and 60 GB a day works out to about 22 TB a year.

That is a real slice of the drive's life, but not an emergency. Smaller or older drives have lower ratings, so they have the most reason to act now.

Check Your SSD's Health in Windows 11

Windows 11 can show how much life your SSD has left, with no extra software.

1. Open Storage settings. Go to Settings > System > Storage > Advanced storage settings > Disks & volumes.
2. Open the drive's properties. Click your SSD, then Properties.
3. Read Drive health. Look at Estimated remaining life, Available spare and Temperature.

No Drive health section? It only appears for NVMe SSDs. For SATA drives and full details, use the free tool from your drive's maker:

• Samsung Magician - health, total data written and firmware updates for Samsung SSDs.
• Kingston SSD Manager - the same checks for Kingston drives.

Using another brand? Our SSD and USB tools list has more free drive utilities.

Quick questions