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Spotify App Accused of Thrashing Storage Drives With Excessive Data Writes

navaira said:
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.
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You obviously haven't used it in a long time. Yep, as a new app it needed some things worked on, but now,especially after iOS 10, it works great.
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decafjava said:
How? Killing your drives is better?
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To a troll, yes. Remember what else trolls like to do and it makes sense.
 
drumcat said:
Spotify, sponsored by Seagate and WD?
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It won't really hurt standard hard drives. SSD drives on the other hand have a limited number of writes to the storage before it wears out. 99% of consumers are in no danger of ever hitting these limits but if software malfunctions such as with Spotify, it can use those up much faster and lead to early failure.
 
kryten42 said:
The auto update was not working, but re-downloaded from the website and it updated to the newer version. Now to see if it is going to write less!
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If you havent received the update automatically, go to "About Spotify", click the download link, and restart Spotify after the download is complete. The fixed version is 1.0.42.151.
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Wackery said:
does this bug consume data in the background even when the app isn't open?
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No.
 
dumastudetto said:
it's not just Spotify, Chrome, Firefox and Edge all do something similar when you leave the browser running on your machine.
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With the web browsers it's mostly caching of data and images so visited pages will load faster. Sites with certain kinds of video content and/or websockets create persistent connections that constantly consume CPU and memory if left open.
 
AxiomaticRubric said:
With the web browsers it's mostly caching of data and images so visited pages will load faster.
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The problem with Firefox and Chrome is that they constantly save your session in case the browser crashes. This happens even if you don't actively browse and/or disable disk caching.
 
Not directly related to the Spotify issue, but a line in the story gave me pause: "...potentially significantly reducing the life of users' storage drives - particularly SSD devices, which have a finite amount of write capacity"

What? I thought SSD drives lasted MUCH longer than spin-drives. I remember reading several tests in the interwebs where the SSD's tested lasted the equivalent of decades of writes/rewrites before expiring (and some of the drives were still going as of the writing). Damned if I can find them now, of course.

Am I mistaken? Are SSD's more vulnerable than spin drives?

Edit: Found the link: http://techreport.com/review/27436/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-two-freaking-petabytes
The SSD's being tested lasted the equivilent of a thousand years of normal use--and some were still going.
 
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SnarkyBear said:
Not directly related to the Spotify issue, but a line in the story gave me pause: "...potentially significantly reducing the life of users' storage drives - particularly SSD devices, which have a finite amount of write capacity"

What? I thought SSD drives lasted MUCH longer than spin-drives. I remember reading several tests in the interwebs where the SSD's tested lasted the equivalent of decades of writes/rewrites before expiring (and some of the drives were still going as of the writing). Damned if I can find them now, of course.

Am I mistaken? Are SSD's more vulnerable than spin drives?
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No, but it's unnecessary wear and tear, I think that's the point they were trying to make. Yes, I've seen sites intentionally try to kill SSDs and they last like 10x longer than previously thought.

I had the same reaction, lol.
 
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Radeon85 said:
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.
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Nobody says it uses lots of storage on your drive. They say it's writing the data that it stores again and again and again.
 
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truthertech said:
You obviously haven't used it in a long time. Yep, as a new app it needed some things worked on, but now,especially after iOS 10, it works great.
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I concur. It's much better now I've actually become a paid member. There's some polishing left still but it's definitely gone from unusable to pretty good.
 
AxiomaticRubric said:
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! o_O
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Nope. You can set the music cache to another directory, but installing it in another directory on another drive or setting the music cache won't solve the problem. A secondary cache and a database file called "mercury" gets written to. I solved this issue months ago by setting up a link folder through command prompt on Windows. It'll show up in its required directory, but it's a mirror of the files set on a mechanical drive. It's a difficult concept to a lot of people, but the data isn't being written to my SSD boot drive. It shows up there, but it's merely mirrored.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS_symbolic_link

Also simple to do on other OS forms.
 
AxiomaticRubric said:
With the web browsers it's mostly caching of data and images so visited pages will load faster. Sites with certain kinds of video content and/or websockets create persistent connections that constantly consume CPU and memory if left open.
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On the issue of Chrome: Which websites are ones you should avoid leaving open if you are the kind of user who has multiple tabs left open for long periods of time?
 
GordonGekko999 said:
On the issue of Chrome: Which websites are ones you should avoid leaving open if you are the kind of user who has multiple tabs left open for long periods of time?
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mostly heavy sites and executable code sites (games, MONITORING, Auto updatable pages). This forum is just one heavy))
 
I wonder if that might explain why I kept getting "you are about to run out of disk space" messages, when I still had approx 250GB left free of 750GB SSD. I did not like the Spotify interface so cancelled my subscription at the end of the free three months I got with a Lexar 128GB SDXC card. I just checked and there were as few remnants of the installation left, which I have now cleared out.
 
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My PowerPC G5 10.5 Leopard install of Spotify doesn't seem to thrash. Must be a later version.
 
Darn it! I was blissfully unaware of this until now. And maybe I'm in the minority, but I really like the desktop app. I tried apple music (and still have a subscription currenty), but I really like spotify a lot more.
 
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