topic HDD LED flashes permanently in Desktop (Windows)

HDD LED flashes permanently

kiepe — Wed, 19 Sep 2018 20:04:21 GMT

Plan

Premium

Device

PC Windows client and Spotify web player. On desktop PC and laptop

Operating System

Windows 10

My Question or Issue

The hard drive light flashes continuously when the spotify client program is running, or when i am using the web player. i am afraid that my ssds will lose their lifetime. Is it not possible to optimize the behavior in order to reduce the writing cycles on the drives?

Re: HDD LED flashes permanently

Loxer — Fri, 13 Sep 2019 06:35:49 GMT

Hey there, welcome to the Community.

Hope you're doing great!

That's something unavoidable becasue you're using your computer and of course many things will be written to the SSD to. You can check this article to learn more about that and some tips to extend it's lifespan. Also, this Community post would help you too to limit the cache Spotify creates locally.

I also have another tip for you to install apps from Windows Store or even some other apps in another drive if you happen to have one, just read this 2 articles: 1 & 2

Hope it helps 🙂

Re: HDD LED flashes permanently

Sebasty — Wed, 19 Sep 2018 20:57:34 GMT

Hey @kiepe

I understand your concerns. I have a SSD myself too (as an only drive in the machine).

So, curious, I went to see how it's used myself:

As I monitor the disk usage, it kind of fluctuates for me, but is never unexpectedly high. Right now when Spotify plays in the background, the HDD light is calm. Pulling up the Resource Monitor, I didn't find any Spotify-specific activity on the HDD despite the little fact I have a song playing. Highest activity is when the song switches, then it goes to reading the page file (and numerous system threads write to Spotify's stuff) and reading-writing storage files of itself. All below 25KB/s which is pretty small.

Right now there isn't really any way to decrease write cycles for the HDD. If paging file is accessed often (you should see the high activity in accessing the paging file as big peaks in hard faults in Resource Monitor), then buy more RAM.

But in general, modern solid states have come a long way from where they started.
If you're still anxious over continuous data writing reducing your SSD's life, you may want to read this. I did before I ordered my SSD and I was considerably less stressed. 🙂
(also, the bigger your SSD, the longer it will last, technically.)

Hope this helps, have a nive day!

Re: HDD LED flashes permanently

uncajesse — Fri, 13 Sep 2019 00:28:41 GMT

I tried every solution I've seen on the forums, except for the write permissions one. Going to try that and reboot.

That being said, I've been dealing with 15-20 minute startup time before Spotify becomes usable at all (for playing audio or clicking/UI responsiveness).

That's IF I delete the cache before I start it. There's NO local files to even scan, but that's all off too.

If I don't delete the cache first, it actually takes at least 45 minutes for Spotify to become responsive!!!!!!!!!!

I have Spotify on its own hard drive, so that it can ruin a drive that I don't care about, and I won't lose any data, so it's the only thing using that drive. and it GRINDS the entire time. The hard drive barely ever stops grinding the ENTIRE time.

I've been dealing with this for over 5 years now... So I'll absolutely report back if preventing /Data from being written to (for every user and group on my computer, including SYSTEM) changes anything. I'll need to reboot so whatever Spotify is accessing/doing isn't cached by Windows (because it's way faster opening it the second/etc time after Windows boots)

We all know that this is RIDICULOUS that ANY of this has to be done, and that Spotify clearly doesn't care about these issues AT ALL.