Some bugs can be classified as low severity, then there are those that compromise user data or system security, and above them we find those with the potential to destroy hardware. It seems hard to believe, but it's exactly what has happened with Spotify, at least during the last five months. A bug in its desktop client for Windows and OS X caused the writing of hundreds of gigabytes without any need, which could pulverize the average SSD, or drastically shorten its useful life.
Like hard drives, solid-state drives are not indestructible. Their integrity has improved a lot in recent years, thanks to new chips, more efficient controllers, and polished firmware solutions, but deep down we know there is a write limit for everything related to NAND technology. Several specialized portals have carried out their own endurance tests, although results depend a lot on brand and model. When an SSD registers failures in a sector, it begins to relocate to the so-called overprovisioning area, and in the vast majority of cases, each SSD managed to exceed with a wide margin the limit suggested by the manufacturer. Now, this implies normal use conditions, but what happens when a program starts writing uncontrolled garbage?
That's what Spotify users have been asking themselves for months. Several reports from Reddit, Hacker News, and even the official Spotify forum point in the same direction: The client writes chilling amounts of data when it is idle or playing a song. Moving the Spotify cache location to a traditional hard drive does not solve the problem, since the affected files (essentially the database) remain on the SSD. The numbers we have seen in the complaints range from 10 gigabytes per hour to 10 gigabytes every fifteen seconds. 10 GB in an hour follows the pace of a normal database, but writing 10 GB every fifteen seconds suggests a gigantic database, and could kill an SSD in 96 hours. Obviously that is an extreme situation, however, what we consider unacceptable is the lack of response from Spotify.
Studying each case we have noticed that the client has been carrying this bug for a long time, and only after the media echoed it did the company release an update with version 1.0.42, fixing the problem. Personally, I stopped using Spotify about a year ago only because its local client is effectively of very poor quality, but Spotify is not alone. Both Firefox and Chrome have been accused of indiscriminate writes, and even though the final values remain far below what is needed to knock out an SSD, they confirm that many of our favorite programs do not have the proper optimizations.
Source: Ars Technica
