Spotify May Be Killing Your SSD With Excessive Data Writes

For the past five months, the Spotify music streaming app for Mac, Windows, and Linux “has been assaulting users’ storage devices with enough data to potentially take years off their expected lifespans.” More troublesome: the issue occurs even when the Spotify app is idle and isn’t storing any songs locally, according to Ars Technica.

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According to the report, some users are seeing hundreds of gigabytes writing in an hour. In some cases, the recorded amounts are measured in terabytes.

For those with a solid state drive (SSD), this issue is most problematic since the lifetime of SSDs depends on the amount of data written to them.

To see the amount of data Spotify has written on your drive, go to the Activity Manager under Utilities. From there, click on the Disk tab.

Thankfully, according to Ars Technica, the latest Spotify update fixes the issue:

We’ve seen some questions in our community around the amount of witten 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.

You can find the version number for your Spotify installation by clicking on Spotify > About Spotify from within the application.

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