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 !!!

[TheSeven]

On Windows, that VACUUM; command is in a file named libcef.dll.

That file is coming from the Chromium Framework, but it's probably just used as a wrapper around SQLite. The data stored in the mercury.db file is actually Spotify's, not Chromium's.

[shirantrixi]

Hallo,das funktioniert so nicht! Den Cache auf ein anderes Laufwerk "umbiegen" bringt nichts!Beim nächsten Start ist alles beim alten auch wenn man in Spotify angewiesen hat wo der Cachespeicher zu finden ist.

Schickt man Fragen an Spotify bekommt man NIE Antworten!!

[herbert78]

And once again, music pirates are the winners, honest customers are losers and treated like idiots. Spotity is such an incapable and arrogant company!

[MaxK_DE]

I am affected by the bursts every few minutes. In the past 8 hours, Spotify wrote about 25GB to my drive.

Size of mercury.db is 89MB in my case.

[herbert78]

And once again, music pirates are the winners, honest customers are losers and treated like idiots. Spotity is such an incapable and arrogant company!

[MaxK_DE]

Hi shirantrixi,

i don't know how you tried to redirect the Spotify Cache to another drive (the thread is quite extensive...), but you could use a Windows "junction" instead of using the settings in the Spotify application. See https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa365006(v=vs.85).aspx for more information on this topic. Junctions are working fine for me since I created them for Spotify and some other applications on my PC some months ago because my SSD was running out of space.

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Hallo shirantrixi,

ich weiß nicht genau, auf welche Weise du versucht hast, den Cache-Speicherort umzubiegen (der Thread ist mittlerweile recht umfangreich...), aber du kannst eine Windows "Junction" nutzen, um das zu tun. Siehe auch https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa365006(v=vs.85).aspx zu dem Thema, was das ist. Mit Junctions funktioniert das bei mir seit einigen Monaten super, seit ich welche für Spotify und andere Anwendungen eingerichtet habe (auf meiner SSD ging mir der Speicherplatz aus)

[Kantana]

TheSeven: Thanks for pointing me to the correct file for Windows. I edited it and that seems to have worked wonderfully.

[nename0]

I have the same problem on Windows.

Measured with Proccess Monitor Sporify did 320000 Read and write operations on a track switch(on files: mercury.db, mercury.db-wal, and in the Temp folder a file called etilqs_8kagr8xIE0dLTL5). This is terrible for SSDs. The appdata\local\spotify folder was 3.7GB before and after this test. The mercury.db was 40MB before and after this test.

It uses the VACUUM; command(https://sqlite.org/lang_vacuum.html)(Which is probably causing the thousands of reads and writes).

[Styless]

Hello,

is it possibly that the same thing happen in the android app?

Because my phone only have an internal memory...so that would be terrible

[Arkanius]

I will write a little and easy tutorial for the workaround solution that Kallizm told us based on the mklink he posted. 

It looks complicated but it isn´t. You will just tell windows to use a path on C: but in reality you use the space from the second harddrive.

I will not take responsibility if anything goes wrong!

EDIT

As several user mentioned this fix is not a workaround for the main problem. I am sorry i thought i have wrote a good solution but nahhhh 😜

This option is still usefull because it writes the cache on the second hardrive rather the SSD.

Sorry Arkanius, but this doesn't solve it. The files that are the problem here are mercury.db, mercury.db-wal and %temp%\etilqs_*
Each of them gets around 30% of the write traffic, so fixing the first two (which are easier to redirect) would already remove 60% of the SSD traffic, but wouldn't completely fix it either.

EDIT2

I´v updated the tutorial to include the whole spotify folder including mercury.db
and mercury.db-wal to catch the writing to ~60%

Requirments:

• Another Disk where you can store the Spotify files
• Tutorial is written based on the standard installation path

Steps:

1. Navigate to second Harddisk
   
   
2. Create a folder name it as you like
3. Navigate into the empty folder
4. Copy the PATH from the folder into notepad
   (to do that, click on a free space next to the Breadcrumb)
   
   
   1. In my case it is E:\SpotifyCache
5. Stop Spotify
6. Press WINDOWS + R to open the RUN command
7. Type C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Local\Spotify and press OK
   
   
8. Copy all data from C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Local\Spotify to the new created folder on the second Hardrive.
9. Delete the whole Spotify folder located on C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Local\
10. Press WINDWOS + R and run the command CMD to start the command prompt
    
    
11. Type or copy in this command
    mklink /j "C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Local\Spotify" PathToNewFolder and press enter
    
    1. In my case it was 
       mklink /j "C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Local\Spotify" E:\SpotifyCache
       
12. It should tell you something like
    

    Connection established for C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Local\Spotify <<===>> E:\SpotifyCache

13. There should be a shortcut icon now 
    
    
14. Now you are done and can start spotify 🙂

Everything that is now saved in the Spotify Folder on C: is stored on the second harddrive.