Major I/O write bytes on the Spotify Desktop app. It will kill SSD drives in record time (fixed)

[MinionMan74]

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EDIT: According to Spotify this issue has been fixed in the 1.0.42 version so the case has been closed. Personally I have no more issues with this anymore on any computer. Thanks everyone for making this happen !!!

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original post:
Major disk write activity detected on the Windows/Mac app. Does not behave like that when using the browser player.

Please look into this thread, more details there:
https://community.spotify.com/t5/Desktop-Linux-Windows-Web-Player/Spotify-killing-my-SSD/m-p/1365378

Attached readouts from a Win7/64 PC during one hour and ten minutes. No offline playlist syncs and zero songs were played during that hour, only the spotify app tray active in background!

No disk drive, SSD or standard HDD can take that rate for a long period of time.

PLEASE ADDRESS THIS ISSUE ASAP OR BE THE NEXT SAMSUNG NOTE !!!

[QBRSC21]

It could be that one of you playlist is constantly re-syncing over and over and over again. I fixed this by pretty much remaking the playlist. you could also turn offline avalabilty on and off to see if that stops the poblem. 

[MinionMan74]

I have zero lists on the PC in offline mode. And making playlists again..? Even if I knew which one it would be a total pain in the **bleep** to make it again. But thx for the suggestion, maybe the spotify people notice this behaviour too and fix it.

[skitapa]

I heard my Mac working like crazy with the screen off. Checked with top and it had a load average of 2.40, 2.33, 2.22 while not doing anything.

When I checked activityMonitor Spotify had written 260 GB of data.

Something is seriously wrong here.

[MinionMan74]

True that. I switched to browser: only spotify player on a single tab in Chrome (no other browsing) and its been on for 4 hours now with only 1.2GB of write bytes.

[lanciastratos]

Glad I'm not the only one experiencing this.

I just noticed in my Mac's Activity Monitor (2012 MacBook Pro Retina, MacOS Sierra) the Spotify process has written over 1.26TB to my SSD drive and has read over 30GB. I only have a 256GB drive on my laptop, so those numbers don't make a lot of sense to me.

Nevertheless, I don't listen to anywhere near that much music. Something is wrong.

[sywesk]

Well, you know, if you have an excel file, and you delete the whole
content, save, readd the whole content, save, you file will have the same
size, but your SSD will have endured 2 times the size of the file in
writes. A write is just writing somewhere on the SSD, it has nothing to do
with it's size. If you want you can even write a hundred time the same
thing on the same part of the SSD.

So spotify using 1.26 tb means that it actually sent 1.26 tb to write on
the SSD, on cache files, that are then deleted, and replaced by other cache
files and so on.

[firef]

Yes, no one is claiming there are large files being written, but rather that Spotify is using ridiculous amounts of write cycles which will kill drives, especially SSDs. It likely is constantly writing to a database table and updating it which is excessive when 200mb of streamed music uses 50GB of writes or when the program is literally idling and doing nothing and it uses 75GB of writes overnight. Something is wrong.

[lanciastratos]

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@sywesk wrote:
Well, you know, if you have an excel file, and you delete the whole
content, save, readd the whole content, save, you file will have the same
size, but your SSD will have endured 2 times the size of the file in
writes. A write is just writing somewhere on the SSD, it has nothing to do
with it's size. If you want you can even write a hundred time the same
thing on the same part of the SSD.

So spotify using 1.26 tb means that it actually sent 1.26 tb to write on
the SSD, on cache files, that are then deleted, and replaced by other cache
files and so on.

---

I'm well aware of what is happening under the hood (I'm a software developer) — that's why I know there is a problem. There is no excuse for a streaming music program to write 1.26TB of data to my hard drive over the course of a few days with limited usage.

Since restarting Spotify last night and listening to one song, Spotify has written 66GB and read 2.25GB of data on my SSD.

As mentioned in the previous post, there is some type of serious bug in the application which is constantly over-writing internal data files. This must be addressed because it could have a serious impact to the lifetiime of our hardware.

[MinionMan74]

Something IS very wrong at the moment. And when we start seeing all the macbooks of the world catching on fire its too late. And all other people with lets say 1-3 years old computers with SSD drives will have a blue monday soon. Just if they have the Spotify app installed, no need to even use it or listen to music. It will kill your computer without a warning. And this is not just an opinion, its a fact. Its only a matter of time.

Spotify needs to address this issue asap. For their own sake. Or do we really want this app to be the next Samsung note..?

[user-removed]

I have the same problem, 1.5+ GB running Spotify for around 1 hour on Mac OS X 10.11.6 Spotify version 1.0.39.157.g674ae377

edit: OP, maybe smart to change the title (if possible), so it's more clear what the issue is and we might could draw more attention to this.