Spotify writes massive amounts of junk data to storage devices
By Alexandre Trochut
Spotify has been deploying an important update for all its customers on computers since today. It fixes a serious bug that caused tens of gigabytes of data to be written to the storage unit without any specific action by the user.
Are you a loyal listener of Spotify? You are spending many hours listening every day to your playlists on the swedish music platform? If this description matches you, then it's time for you to think about updating the application on your computer, as it appeared that some of the previous versions of the software are dysfunctional. The problem is quite old because some testimonials of users complaining about this bug go back to June 2016.
Up to 700GB in one day
Ars Technica, who has studied the problem, says that three of its editors have sought to reproduce the problem, and that they have succeeded every time. In the tests reproduced, the application wrote between 5 and 10 GB of junk data in less than an hour. Some testimonials even mention writings in the order of 700 GB if Spotify works more than a day. Note that they take place in the temporary folder defined by the application.
A concern for SSDs
The problem is serious because by assaulting users' storage devices with that amount of data, the music streaming app has probably reduce their life span by several years. Reports of tens or in some cases hundreds of gigabytes being written in an hour aren't uncommon, and occasionally the recorded amounts are measured in terabytes. The overload happens even when Spotify is idle and isn't storing any songs locally.
Spotify claims to have fixed the problem with the 1.0.42 update so if you have the option to download it, do it now ! Especially if you have an SSD. This version 1.0.42 corrects the problem well, but the deployment being progressive, it did not solve the situation right away for everyone.
The correction of the problem was confirmed by Spotify, who said it would take several days before the update affects all users. In case you have not yet received this new version, it is recommended to close the software and go through the web version. Spotify restarts the updates.
