Spotify is one of the most popular music streaming services out there. But it turns out it’s also a dangerous one, at least for your SSD’s life. The app has been quietly killing your SSD’s life for months by writing massive amounts of data over and over, even when the service was in idle mode.
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The problem should be fixed thanks to a new update that Spotify is rolling out, but Ars Technica reports that the problem wasn’t addressed in a speedy manner.
Users have been complaining about the issue for at least five months on the company’s official forum, but also on Reddit, Hacker News, and other places.
“This is a *major* bug that currently affects thousands of users,” Spotify user Paul Miller told Ars. “If for example, Castrol Oil lowered your engine’s life expectancy by five to 10 years, I imagine most users would want to know, and that fact *should* be reported on.”
Ars was able to replicate the problem, discovering that the app wrote anywhere from 5GB to 10GB of data in less than an hour, even when left in idle. Leaving Spotify running for periods longer than a day results in data writes amounting to 700GB.
SSDs, as fast as they might be, have a limited amount of life. The more data you write to them, the closer their death. And while that max ceiling should still offer regular users plenty of actual usage time, having the SSD write hundreds of gigabytes because of an app error isn’t helping.
The Spotify app shows the same behavior regardless of operating system and affects Windows, Mac, and Linux machines. Version 1.0.42 of the app should fix the issue, with the update being currently rolled out to customers.
“We’ve seen some questions in our community around the amount of written data using the Spotify client on desktop,” Spotify told Ars only after the report was published. “These have been reviewed and any potential concerns have now been addressed in version 1.0.42, currently rolling out to all users.”
