A Reddit user has posted an alarming investigation into the disk activity associated with AMD's PC graphics driver. Among other examples of heavy storage traffic, it turns out the AMD graphics driver is making hundreds of modifications to log files every time you move or resize a window. So, is the AMD graphics driver a clear and present danger to your SSD?
Probably not, actually.
"The Samsung 990 Pro 2 TB is rated for 1200 TBW. You'll need to be drawing windows around for 11.5 days to use 1 TBW of that. Or 38 years to reach the rated writes just using this bug."
You then also have to factor in drive caching. Not every byte of data sent to your SSD is immediately written to the actual flash memory cells. Lots of tiny writes as per the AMD driver logging, as opposed to one big write that doesn't fit into the cache, are exactly the kind of traffic which the SSD cache memory is designed to mitigate.
In other words, yes the AMD graphics does make a lot of writes to your SSD. But they don't actually add up to anything significant in terms of drive wear.
Indeed, Windows is notorious for having what you might call an overall disk write "problem." Compared to Linux, it scarcely lets your storage have an idle moment. So, the AMD driver is but a small part of that activity.
At worst you could argue that given Windows tends to be a bit of an over sharer with storage devices, it would be welcome if the AMD graphics driver didn't add to that. But then event logging is an important part of driver quality and reliability.
So, we can chalk this one down as an interesting insight into how a modern PC actually works. There's a lot going on in the background. But we probably don't need to panic about all of it.
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