Is Spotify killing your SSD?

For those who use Spotify’s music streaming service, you may want to reconsider. For five months, users reported that the app was feeding storage devices with data that could potentially take years off of their expected lifespans.

Reports show the company’s software is writing vast amounts of data to local drives for no reason. Overload occurs even when Spotify is idle and isn’t storing songs locally. The bug is very severe, especially because several users today have solid-state drives. While you wouldn’t believe a single app could write enough data to cause hardware issues for a solid-state component, the numbers will surprise you.

Users have been seeing 20−30GB of data written while playing the app for short periods per day. Leaving the app running for more than a day leaves a write-per-drive of up to 700GB. If a user streamed music at 10 Mbps (an absurd rate for audio), he or she would still only manage to stream 108GB of data for the entire day. So either Spotify mistakenly slipped a few decimals when it encoded its video library, or it has a huge bug.

Reluctantly, Spotify claims it has already fixed the problem in the 1.0.42 version. The company released this statement:

We’ve seen some questions in our Community around the amount of written data using the Spotify client on desktop. These have been reviewed and any potential concerns have now been addressed in version 1.0.42, currently rolling out to all users.

However, many users are stating that they have not seen the update yet and that the existing version continues to sift through SSD storage data at a frightening rate.

But there may be a solution: Process Explorer can monitor how much data Spotify writes to SSDs. Users with versions of the app before 1.0.42 should check that it isn’t behaving poorly before continuing to use it. For those with a third-party service from the drive manufacturer that monitors its health, you may want to pull it and look into it. If you’ve used the app for the past months, you could see hundreds of gigabytes of writes. While SSDs typically survive well past their listed write speeds, this type of coverage could expose them to dangerous territory.

Source: ExtremeTech