In recent days, some users of AMD processors and graphics cards have detected strange behavior on their systems: the company’s drivers could be writing data to the SSD drives hundreds of times in very short periods.
The alert arose when users reviewed certain log files and noticed continuous modifications every time a window was moved or resized. As reported by a Reddit user, registrations were increasing rapidly and, by deactivating a service called AMD External Events Utilitythe writing stopped immediately.
This confirmed that AMD drivers are responsible, even on computers that use GPUs from other brands, such as Nvidia, which suggests that chipset drivers could be involved.
Although the writing volume may seem high, in-depth analysis shows that the amount of data actually written is very low. The drivers log information at a rate slightly faster than 1 MB/s, considerably less than random paging file writing. Generally speaking, the impact on SSD lifespan is probably negligible, so users should not worry.
The exact purpose of these scripts has not yet been clarified by AMD. The community of users and experts suspects that they could be related to the function FreeSync, and disabling it could affect the performance or other functions of the GPU.
At the moment, AMD has not issued official comments on this behavior. Although the write frequency may be alarming at first glance, experts agree that it is probably a driver maintenance mechanism, with minimal effects on the longevity of the drive.
So although some AMD drivers record hundreds of writes to an SSD, the amount of data is low and the risk to the life of the disk is practically non-existent.