A Spotify bug thrashed subscribers' drives for the past five months

The Mac/Win/Lin versions of Spotify wrote hundreds of gigabytes of bad data per day to their 40,000,000 users, thrashing their drives.

Solid State Drives can only be written to a limited number of times before their fail. Even for users without SSDs (or those who aren't worried about drive wear) had to contend with wasted resources and limited drive space.

Three Ars reporters who ran Spotify on Macs and PCs had no trouble reproducing the problem reported not only in the above-mentioned Spotify forum but also on Reddit, Hacker News, and elsewhere. Typically, the app wrote from 5 to 10 GB of data in less than an hour on Ars reporters' machines, even when the app was idle. Leaving Spotify running for periods longer than a day resulted in amounts as high as 700 GB.

Spotify officials hadn't responded to Ars questions more than two days after they were sent. According to comments left in the Spotify forum in the past 24 hours, the bug has been fixed in version 1.0.42, which is in the process of being rolled out. The update remains unavailable to many users, this reporter included. And that means Spotify's drive-assaulting behavior continues unabated for many.

Spotify is writing massive amounts of junk data to storage drives
[Dan Goodin/Ars Technica]


(Image: Internal Hard Drive, Petr Kratochvil, public domain; Fire, Littlevisuals.co, CC-0)