AMD Radeon graphics driver 26.10.2 has a bug in it that leads to overzealous SSD write activity. The bug is important to you because it can reduce the lifetime of your solid state drives through wear and tear. If you have an AMD graphics card, you'll want to check your system logs for strange happenings before or after installing or upgrading to this version of the driver.
AMD acknowledges excessive SSD writes in driver 26.10.2
The bug is due to 'AMD External Events Utility' (atieclxx.exe) service having issues with Microsoft PCIe filter drivers. This combination leads to constantly running background writes to your storage devices using the PCIe bus. The driver bug does not impact the GPU specifically, but instead impacts the stability and lifespan of your storage devices.
The write speeds of the data in this buggy condition go as high as 5 MB/s. This is equivalent to 432 GB more data written to your SSD every day. This is a lot of additional data for your SSD to have to handle which is very risky for your SSD lifespan, especially in the low-capacity QLC drives which have less endurance than other types of NAND.
AMD has posted a response on Reddit acknowledging the issue. They're currently testing a fix which will be included in a future driver version. You can disable the AMD External Events Utility service in Windows Services manager to mitigate the issue. Disabling Resizable BAR (ReBAR) in your system's BIOS also fixes the excessive writes problem.
We're still able to download the driver version 26.10.2 (aka 8.09.28.1124), but with the above risk to your storage. AMD is looking into why their utility is causing problems with the Microsoft drivers. We'd advise you to wait for the patched driver version or use the manual workarounds if you have to use the current version.
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