Smartphone: When Spotify shortens life expectancy hard drives

UG – After a virus problem appeared early October, Spotify is facing a new problem: a problem of computer software to cause serious damage to the hard drives, from overheating to premature death. Whether or not you use your computer …

This is not the festival (music) for Spotify recently. There was first a virus circulating via an ad that could contaminate users clicking on the banner. But this time, the concern could be trickier. For several months, Internet users are flooding the various forum posts railing against the famous music streaming service. The problem: it would undermine the integrity of computers. At the same point to toast a party hard drives.

After reading the complaints of users of the desktop version of Spotify, journalists specialized site Ars Technica went there of their experimentation. And they found that the downloaded software had indeed tend to write a lot of data on the hard disk, the application is running or not.
Hundreds of GB of data written without your knowledge

Ars Technica noted that Spotify has managed to write 5 to 10 GB of data in less than an hour without the program running. In use, we even exceeded the threshold of 700 GB of data in hours. Overload for the capacity of most computers, but also for bandwidth subscribers, whether the devices on Windows, Mac or Linux.

According to the site, thousands of users are impacted. An important bug that can have consequences ranging from machine slowdown impact the life of computers. Because Spotify is sending a very large amount of data on storage devices that have limited writing skills. And that could lead to the premature death of the hard drive, found the journalists of the site.
A patch being deployed

The lighting problem by Ars Technica pushed Spotify to react. “We had some community feedback on the amount of data written using the Spotify client for office. These were reviewed and potential problems addressed in the update 1.0.42 is currently deployed to users” , explained the Scandinavian company.

The fix will be available soon for users. The update will automatically install the startup Spotify. If you have not thought about closing the application, a blue banner will appear to advise you to restart Spotify.