Your desktop’s hard drive might be in danger of losing a few years of its lifespan if you are an avid user of Spotify’s desktop app for accessing tuneage or satisfying your music cravings.
Several Spotify subscribers are facing a serious issue. Reportedly, Spotify’s Mac, Windows and Linux based apps are involved in writing hundreds of gigabytes of data. This data writing is being performed on a daily basis and it is being stored on the computer’s hard drive. Needless to say that such massive amount of data written on a daily basis would substantially reduce the lifespan of your hard drive.
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It is better to switch to the mobile or web version of the app for the time being. The data writing and storing continues even when the app is in idle mode and not busy storing locally. Ars Technica could clearly explain the reason behind this sudden change in the app’s storing habits but the company has urged music lovers to avoid using Spotify apps for Windows, Mac or Linux operating systems.
It is also important to note that even SSD (solid-state drive or solid-state disk) come with a limited range of read-write cycles despite that these don’t have moving parts. Therefore, Spotify app’s uncalled for data writing spree can certainly affect the computer’s performance negatively.
According to sources from Spotify, the issue has now being fixed in the upcoming version 1.0.42 of Spotify and very soon it will be available for all the users. As soon as this new version is released, it is recommended that you update your software so that your hard drive doesn’t stop performing well prematurely.
Ars Technica stated that the apps are writing data on users’ hard drives for around five months now. The data that has already been written is so huge that it might take years away from the expected lifespan of your hard drive. There have been reports from Spotify subscribers that the app sometimes manages to write hundreds of gigabytes within an hour. In some cases, the written data was estimated to be in terabytes.
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According to a Spotify user Paul Miller, “This is a *major* bug that currently affects thousands of users. If for example, Castrol Oil lowered your engine’s life expectancy by five to 10 years, I imagine most users would want to know and that fact *should* be reported on.”
Millar’s suggest that this massive data writing feat is linked to one or more databases that contain the string Mercury.db in their titles, however, for now, Ars Technica has confirmed an update from Spotify that will fix the issue.
Last month Spotify website was also caught dropping malware-infested ads on its premium users so don’t be surprise with the latest bug.
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