Over the past week, reports have started surfacing about a major bug for Spotify. According to various user reports, the music streaming application would write several hundreds of gigabytes within an hour. While the bug was first encountered earlier in the year, it didn’t surface to major attention till this week. In response to the growing concern, Spotify has fixed the bug in their new version 1.0.42 of their desktop app.
From the various reports, the amount being written to drives in an hour ranged from 5 to 10GB. However, the amount being written is based off of the user playlist database. The bug causes the app to constantly rewrite the database. For users with extremely large playlists, the amount being written is massive, with some reports claiming 900GB an hour.
While all of these writes would no doubt impact user performance, another hidden danger is to SSDs. Due to the nature of NAND flash storage, SSDs have a finite number of writes they can endure. At the extreme cases, the Spotify app could kill the drive within days. Even if it doesn’t kill the drive, it can void the warranty as many manufacturers end their warranty after the drive exceeds a certain amount of writes.
For those running Spotify, the update to version 1.0.42 is being rolled out over the next couple of days. To upgrade, simply turn off the Spotify app and turn it back so it will check for the update. For those who don’t want to wait, the possibility exists of uninstalling and reinstalling the application. Even better would be moving the app to a hard disk drive if possible just in case.
