topic Spotify slow after downloading to SD card in Android

SD card performance issue fix

11123349791 — Tue, 02 Mar 2021 11:47:30 GMT

Hello everyone,

I've been using spotify on android for a number of years. but with small capacity phones. 16gb, 32 gb and now 64 gb with a s9 plus.

i've always bought cheap sd cards to massively increase storage at a relatively cheap cost.

But whenever i download a bunch of tracks for offline use to save on mobile data or travelling, my spotify slows to a crawl with frequent crashes, general unresponsiveness and just extremely slow loading of the app and songs.

The reason for this is that the random read write on your low end sd cards are absolutely terrible. which is important for retrieving a large number of songs.

To fix this i bought my first "high end" sd card. Namely the Sandisk extreme pro 128 gb. It has about 4 times higher iops which is a significant increase compared to a regular sd card whch has iops in the 700-1000 range.

And now i don't suffer at all with performance. I wish i knew this years ago and i would have invested in this performance sd card a long time ago.

before this my only option would be to use the phones internal memory to prevent things from slowing to a crawl.

This sd card was not expensive. only roughly 24 usd depending on your region of course, but for anyone thats frustrated with their spotify app just crashing and taking a very long time to play songs and change songs etc, then this fix of replacing the cheap sd card with a faster one will help you alot.

Re: SD card performance issue fix

Jeremy — Tue, 02 Mar 2021 11:55:59 GMT

Hey there @11123349791,

Thank you for your post here in the Community.

It's really nice of you to share this information with other users. We really appreciate it.

Have a great Tuesday and a wonderful continued week 🙂

Take care!

Re: SD card performance issue fix

vaajy — Sat, 03 Feb 2024 20:39:31 GMT

Hi there.

I can confirm this.

Kingston 128 GB microSD Canvas Select Plus UHS-I Speed Class 1 (U1) class 10, V10 before. It was super quick at first on my Samsung cheap €99 phone in offer. Spotify 1 GB loaded in 15 minutes (10 Mb/s internet), app opened in few seconds and playlists loaded in no time. After a year you could clearly see how performance decreased. In 1,5 year everything slow, it was barely usable, but many just buy new one.

On the same 10 Mb/s internet 1 GB downloaded in 20-25 minutes, app opening time up to half the minute and playlists loaded in 10 seconds at least. The most issues with people are throwing receipts as they purchase. I saw it had 5 year warranty and within a quick visit to the shop of purchase I've got full cash back and bought Samsung card. I am done with Kingston quality, it's China quality after all folks!

Samsung 128 GB Micro SDXC EVO Plus, V30 and class 10.

Again, 19,99 euros only, just as much as previous sells now. Just looking around you can get better product for same or less price. Spotify opens from the card INSTANTLY on my internet, playlists loading instantly as well. One gigabyte downloading in 15 minutes, just as expected. I've got again 5 year warranty, so take receipts with you. I feel like this will work much longer.

It's not made in China and it's designed for excessive Android app usage like Spotify in mind.

Spotify slow after downloading to SD card

triplevision_ — Sat, 19 Oct 2024 21:54:16 GMT

Plan

Premium

Country

Device

Xiaomi Mi 10T Lite

Operating System

Android 12

My Question or Issue

I recently downloaded around 20gb of music onto an SD card on my phone and immediately Spotify started to take much longer to load and process anything. I tried removing the downloads and it immediately fixed the issue. Is there anyway to keep my downloads and not have Spotify load so slowly?

Slow mounting of Micro SD card

geoffjwbet — Tue, 12 Aug 2025 11:27:07 GMT

I have tested Spotify on 2 DAPs-Hiby R4 and iBasso DX180. My chosen storage location is Micro SD. When I power off and restart it takes a long time for the Micro SD to mount and therefore Spotify defaults to internal storage and I lose all my downloads on the SD card. This behavior has been substantiated by iBasso. Please refer this to your software engineer.