10GB/hour in writes? Yeesh.
I can’t get a sense reading that or the comments I skimmed if that’s common or just for that one guy. I have used Spotify for awhile now and never noticed any such thing on two different desktops with SSD’s.
some of the comments indicate that they are also seeing the high disk activity.
Maybe it only affects users with paid accounts. I’m monitoring my disk usage right now and it’s writing no more than Chrome. Much less in fact, only about 1.5KB/s to 8KB/s. 800B/s during an ad.
Does Spotify still use a BitTorrent like model where you get parts of your data from other users while streaming? There used to be setting for disk space allocation etc in the preferences of the client, but those seem to be gone now.
And let’s not forget that Spotify Connect drains batteries on many users’ mobile devices endlessly and obnoxiously (as well as creating lots of other buggy behavior), soemthing that the Spotify staff have known about–and actively acknowledged they’re going to do nothing about–for years.
Solution? Stop using Spotify, y’all. I like my Play Music just fine :)
I’m monitoring it in Process Explorer and it does seem to write about 4.5GB per hour. I’m skeptical about that 4.5Gigs being strictly writes to the disk, but even if the whole amount is direct writes that’s not very much in the scheme of things. According to my math, that’d wear out my cheap consumer-level SSD in 15-16 years.
I have Spotify Premium and open idle it’s not doing any writes at all after the initial startup phase. Just 0. For me, at least, it seems to be a non-issue, but I’m probably a low-level user compared to many.
This is me as well. Even when it’s running I recorded only about 500Mb of data being written through the day (I was leaving it paused a lot, so not sure how much concurrent time it ran, but I listened to quite a few songs during the day). I’m sure there is a problem, I’m just curious as to how wide-spread it is?
looks like it’s due to the sql lite db and playlists. the more playlists you have, the more data written.
At 10gb/hour, they are writing several thousands millions of playlists data.
Would explain why I didn’t seem to have the issue. I’ve a very limited number of playlists.
What’s a good alternative to Spotify then? I’d wondered why my phone battery tanked so fast. So does it do that if you don’t even have Spotify open?
That update seems to have stopped it cold. I’ve been monitoring it in Process Explorer and while sitting open its written about 8MB in the past 6 hours.
I switched to Play Music give or take two years ago and haven’t missed Spotify one bit. It does all the same big features (though I’ve been given to understand the Recommendation “Radio” in Spotify is better, but I never really used that), plus in Play Music, you can upload tracks you already have to the cloud and listen to em anywhere, alongside the millions of streaming songs there already.
Count me among those less happy with Spotify these days. It was taking up several GB on my phone despite not having offline mode or any songs downloaded. It’s also been poor at connecting over cellular lately despite a strong connection. And support for my Chromecast is also spotty, it seems to refuse to work for no reason about half the time.
Only issue is my playlists feel locked in. Also I’ve carefully selected about 50 kids songs that I can stand, and don’t want to go through that again :).
Jeff, this only applies to the desktop player not the phone versions.
Same here, and I’ve been very happy with Google Play Music overall. The combination of a vast subscription library plus the ability to fill in occasional gaps by uploading my own is fantastic.
Apple Music is the other service competing in the same space. When I tried it out it worked fine, but I didn’t see any particular reason to switch to it unless you’re already heavily invested in their ecosystem.