AMD has acknowledged a bug in a driver add-on that keeps writing data to some PCs' drives, and one user lost about 1% of drive health a month.
AMD has acknowledged a bug that can make some Radeon graphics PCs write data to their storage drive nonstop, slowly wearing it out. A fix is promised, but no date has been given. Until then, owners may want to check their drives.
The problem sits in the External Events Utility, a small program AMD installs with its drivers. Users say it keeps writing to the drive even when the PC is idle. Two people on AMD's forum measured 0.3 to 1.5 megabytes per second. One Reddit user said it ate up to 1% of their drive health a month for about 16 months. An AMD rep on Reddit said it should hopefully be fixed in the next update.
Reports involve AMD Radeon graphics cards and the Adrenalin Edition app. The first forum report came in July from a user with a Radeon 9060XT. If your PC does not use AMD graphics software, these reports do not describe your setup. How many people are affected is not known.
The alert box above lists the steps. The main trade-off is that turning off the utility can disable FreeSync, a screen smoothing feature, and cause glitches when you swap monitors.
AMD has not said when the update will arrive. Earlier patches did not end the problem for some users, so watch your drive health after any update.
If your PC has an AMD Radeon card, check your drive's health now and watch for steady decline until AMD ships its fix.
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