AMD Confirms Radeon Driver Utility Is Continuously Writing to SSDs, Degrading Storage Health
AMD has acknowledged that its External Events Utility, bundled with Radeon drivers, is performing constant disk writes that are accelerating SSD wear even during idle periods.
While most SSDs experience minimal activity when computers sit unused, some AMD Radeon systems are behaving differently. Reports indicate that AMD's External Events Utility (EEU), which ships with Radeon drivers, continuously writes data to the system drive regardless of whether the computer is actively in use. The issue resurfaced on November 8 when a Reddit user named 'darklinkpower' drew renewed attention to instances of abnormal drive activity.
Multiple Radeon users have documented the impact on their storage hardware. One owner stated, "I just found out that the driver eats up 1% of my SSD health every month for 16 months." Another reported sustained write speeds of roughly 5MB/s while their system was idle. A third user observed their SSD health declining by approximately 1% monthly over the same 16-month span.
AMD has now publicly acknowledged the issue. On October 21, a company representative responded on the firm's community forum, stating, "Yes. We're looking into it with the aim to resolve it in a future driver release." A second representative, identified as AMAD Vik, provided a more optimistic assessment on Reddit, saying, "This is hopefully fixed in the next one," while also offering an apology for the problem.