After being reported in the middle of June in the company’s official support forum, it seems like Spotify has finally taken some action in their latest version 1.0.42. The streaming app has been writing huge caches of data to user hard drives even during idle times to the extent of tens and in some cases hundreds of gigabytes in an hour with recorded measurements in the terabytes. Even when there is no “offline” songs stored, data is being written in huge amounts.
Having affected thousands of users before the update, the strain put on hard drives can wipe years off their operating life. “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” Spotify user Paul Miller told Ars.
Information found in replies posted in official the Spotify forum, the data dumps are tied to one or more of the database files carrying the name that includes the string Mercury.db. With the fix on its way to download shelves as we speak, this should put an end to the wasteful writing to these hard drives.
Via: Ars Technica
