Spotify - Huge Data Writing Bug To Be Patched

[GhostShip]

Most worrying 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-37950627

Reporters from new site Ars Technica found Spotify was writing up to 10GB of data an hour to their computers. Unnecessarily writing and rewriting data to some types of computer hard drive can shorten their life.
Spotify said it was aware of the issue and was taking steps to address it in its latest version. The issue was more likely to be problematic for people using a solid-state hard drive (SSD) in their device. Data on SSDs can be read and rewritten a limited number of times before the drive begins to fail.

Ars Technica found that Spotify wrote and rewrote up to 700GB of data - the equivalent of more than 100 movies - over a 24 hour period.
Many people shared their concerns on social news site Reddit, highlighting that the app even rewrote the data while it was idle and no music was being streamed. Ken Munro, from cybersecurity firm Pen Test Partners, said the problem was "either an error or lazy coding",

I'm not sure why there would need to be this amount of writing/rewriting occurring to form the base of this bug in the first place but I supposed someone using Spotify will doubtless be able to suggest some reasoning for this more than concerning activity.

As always I'm pleased to say I don't use such services 

[White Stripes]

im ... still going to wait out a few more generations of SSDs ...

[Pri]

Spotify uses a SQLite database for playlists. It's called mercury.db and the problem is that they are issuing VACUUM commands to repack the database very often, possibly after every write. VACUUM works by writing the database to a new file and swapping it with the existing file so it will create an enormous amount of life time writes especially if the database is huge which for a lot of customers it is.

I believe they've since fixed the issue in the latest build of Spotify. I would like to point out though, MLC based SSD's like the Samsung 840 Pro are very resilient. In independent testing the 256GB 840 Pro from Samsung was able to handle 2.4 PB (2,400 TB) of writes over I believe a year during Techradars testing. And that is the smaller 840 Pro, they go to 1TB and the more NAND you have the higher the writes you can sustain.

Samsung themselves cover the warranty on their newer 850 Pro's at over 550 TB of writes a year so if you're under that amount and your SSD dies within 10 years they will replace it for free.

Of course I'm not suggesting this makes it okay, what Spotify did was incredibly stupid, I'm just illustrating that for anyone worried about it you're probably fine as this bug has been caught quickly. I personally do not use Spotify.