By Declan Dunn …..
It’s well known that current solid-state drives (SSD) have a finite number of write and erase cycles. This means an SSD is limited on how many times you write and rewrite data on it until it’s headed to the recycle bin. And even standard HDD hard drive disks have a limited life as well, just not as short or sensitive as SSD drives.
But a piece of common software is increasing the likelihood that your SSD drive with meet it’s end-of-live sooner rather than later.
Spotify, the popular music-streaming application is reportedly doing just that – by writing hundreds of needless gigabytes locally to computers where it’s installed, it is slowly killing hard drives and SSDs everywhere. Even worse, the software is said to write these useless bits of data even when the application is idle or set specifically not to store local data.
This is a flaw in the Spotify software users download to their computers to listen to Spotify music. And just so no one is unfairly targeted, this flaw affects Windows, Macs, and Linux machines, is at least five months old.
Complaints on Spotify’s user forums and on other blogs and websites state that the application writes from 5 to 10 GB of data in less than an hour, even when the app is idle. Running Spotify for more than a day could rack data amounts as high as 700 GB! Now this is a lot of useless data!
Savvy computer users can easily find and clean up the mess. But these amounts could definitely take a toll on solid-state drives, shaving years off their lifespans if left unchecked.
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