(Image source: Spotify)
There's bad news for SSD owners who subscribe to Spotify.
It has been discovered that for the past five months or so, the Spotify music streaming app has been secretly writing hundreds of gigabytes of junk data to drives each day.
Worse, this happens even if the app is idle and when no music is being downloaded to be stored locally on to the drive.
According to numerous reports, the app would easily write 5GB to 10GB of data in under an hour. And leaving Spotify on for over a day could result in as much as over 500GB of writes.
The problem is said to be related to one or more database files with the string Mercury.db. A user commented that the file is being written to constantly and gets wiped and rewritten every five or so minutes, leading to massive data written to the drive over time.
SSDs have a limited lifespan that is determined by the amount of data written to it. For most users, this isn't a concern because modern SSDs are pretty clever in managing this. And tests have shown that even in an entry-level 120GB SSD, a drive can comfortably last for years based on normal usage.
However, normal usage is usually pegged at around 10GB to 30GB of writes per day. And Spotify's behavior certainly doesn't fall in the realm of normal usage. In fact, it is many times more than what is considered normal. As a result, SSDs owners who have been using Spotify could find the lifespans of their drives reduced.
Fortunately, an update is in the works and should be rolled out soon. In the meantime, we would advise Spotify users to turn off the app whenever they are not in use.
Source: Ars Technica
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