In June 2016 Spotify announced that its user base had crossed active 100 million users per month. This was possible because of its free and ad-supported version as most of the users are not paying any monthly subscription. Unlike its competitor Apple Music, Spotify, a music streaming site, was quick to get a tremendous user base in short period of time. It has now been over five months and users have already started reporting some issues when running this app on Linux, Mac, and Windows platforms.
Spotify may be killing your SSD or HDD
There is a bug somewhere in the app which is affecting the lifespan of users’ HDD and SSD. The app is continuously writing tens & hundreds of gigabytes of unimportant data to the drive.
How is Spotify affecting your HDD/SDD
Several users have started reporting this problem since June in the company’s support forum, Reddit as well as Hacker News. According to them, Spotify app is writing as much as 5 GB to nearly 10 GB of unnecessary data per hour to the hard drive and accumulating approximately 700 GB of junk data if the app is left running for more than a single day.
This behavior is putting a load on the storage devices of the user, especially the Solid State Devices or SSDs. The unnecessary data does not only use up the disk space of your computer but it also shortens the lifespan of your hard drive by writing a huge amount of data all the time.
SSDs come in a very limited amount of write capacity. Uninterrupted writing of heaps of garbage data to the SSD or HDD will cause the disk to fail!
A comment posted in the Spotify Official forum, clearly states that the bug has been fixed in the latest version of Spotify – which is version no. 1.0.42.
We’ve seen some questions in our Community around the amount of written data using the Spotify client on desktop. These have been reviewed and any potential concerns have now been addressed in version 1.0.42, currently rolling out to all users.
The version is going to roll out soon, but the problem remains for those who have already installed it.
How to address this Spotify problem
As the app writes unnecessary data to the drives if kept running or even idle, one thing you can do is after using the app, close it down completely. It will restrict the additional writing of data to your drives while you are not using it.
Uninstall Spotify for the moment till the new update is released. To do this, open the Control Panel, look for Spotify and select Uninstall.
Next, remove the Spotify app data directory from your computer. Open ‘%appdata%’ in File Explorer and search for the Spotify folder and delete it. Remember to delete it from the Recycle Bin too, if you are facing Disk Space issues.
Update Spotify
Spotify officials have said that Spotify version 1.0.42 is now available to all users. If the update is available for your computer, Spotify will be automatically updated. Nevertheless, you may want to visit the Spotify website and download the latest version right away.
This post will show you how you can use Spotify in unsupported countries.
