Spotify App Accused of Thrashing Storage Drives With Excessive Data Writes

[MacRumors]

Spotify's desktop music streaming app has been accused of putting an unnecessary burden on users' machines by continuously writing massive amounts of data to local storage, even when the app is idle.

Over the last five months, multiple users have posted about the problem in Spotify's official support forum, as well as on Reddit, Hacker News, and elsewhere. Users claim the Spotify app has been writing inordinate amounts of data to their drives while running in the background, in some cases writing up to 10GB every 40 seconds.

Reports of tens or hundreds of gigabytes of data being written in an hour have become commonplace, said ArsTechnica, which was able to replicate the problem on Macs running the current version of the Spotify app. The data writes appear to occur regardless of whether songs are set to be stored locally or if music is actually being played, potentially significantly reducing the life of users' storage drives - particularly SSD devices, which have a finite amount of write capacity.

"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."

Spotify eventually responded to ArsTechnica's requests for comment and said "any potential concerns have now been addressed" in version 1.0.42 of the app, which is in the process of being rolled out, but which reportedly remains unavailable to many users.

According to some reports, the data writes are thought to involve playlist-related database files with titles that include the string Mercury.db. Several manual workarounds to stop the writes have been suggested in the forums, but the best short-term solution for concerned Mac users may be to use Spotify through their browser until the app update becomes available and the issue is independently confirmed fixed.

Article Link: Spotify App Accused of Thrashing Storage Drives With Excessive Data Writes

 

[drumcat]

Spotify, sponsored by Seagate and WD?

 

[tothsa]

I could update to 1.0.42.151.g19de0aa6, so it seems the fixed version is out.

 

[decksnap]

How long has this been going on and where do I sign on to the class action?

 

[Radeon85]

Doesn't effect me Windows 10

 

[raymond7]

Anyone know if there is a log of spotify usage since installation so I can look if I was affected by the bug?

 

[Ritsuka]

Doesn't effect me Windows 10

Yes it does if you are using the standalone app.

 

[mejsric]

Long term solution is Apple Music.

 

[Ritsuka]

Anyone know if there is a log of spotify usage since installation so I can look if I was affected by the bug?

Open Activity Monitor, and selected the Disk tab.

 

[raymond7]

Open Activity Monitor, and selected the Disk tab.

But I meant since time of installation(which is almost a year ago)? Because the activity monitor just shows recent writes since startup?

 

[djeeyore25]

Spotify is a storage hog on all my devices.

 

[miknos]

Spotify app reminds me Adobe Flash. To do something simple as playing a 3mb file, it hogs cpu and memory.

 

[Pakaku]

Long term solution is Apple Music.

Or storing your music directly instead of streaming it...

 

[Ritsuka]

But I meant since time of installation(which is almost a year ago)? Because the activity monitor just shows recent writes since startup?

I don't think the system keeps those statistics, but I might be wrong.

 

[djcerla]

Spotify cooked your SSD.

Imagine the lawsuits, class actions and Walt Mossberg's commentary if that was Apple Music.

 

[AxiomaticRubric]

In the meantime, I think it's possible to set where Spotify stores the data files. Connect an old external hard drive and let the Spotify data vampire feed!

 

[Radeon85]

Yes it does if you are using the standalone app.

I am and have done for a very long time, uses bugger all of the drive for me at least. No excessive writes on my 1TB 850 Pro.

 

[bladerunner2000]

Long term solution is Apple Music.

LOL, no thanks.

 

[840quadra]

Could just be poor memory management.

In it's own way, iTunes is not much better. I have a system that loops white noise that kept killing external drives. Found out later that the software reloads the track into RAM every play, despite it Being set to repeat the same track. The drive would spin down during the playback then later would spin up reload the "next" track, which was actually the same one being played.

Since moving to SSD I haven't had this problem. Before it was a good way to kill external Seagate drives.

 

[Stalwart]

Still better than Apple Music

 

[navaira]

Long term solution is Apple Music.

Long term as in they'll get it to work correctly around 2026?

I'm starting to think long term solution is going back to cassette tapes.

 

[decafjava]

Still better than Apple Music

How? Killing your drives is better?

 

[joueboy]

This brings memory when Microsoft did something to destroy competition. Good thing Apple is smarter now and they have control and stop their a** down.

 

[macduke]

Doesn't surprise me. During my time using Spotify a few years ago their desktop app was crap.

 

[NMBob]

I have spinning disks, so I don't care. I don't have Spotify, so I don't care. But I do have iStat Menus and I've never seen macOS just sit there and do "nothing" with the disk drive.