Update: Spotify has released the following statement regarding its desktop app's hard drive filling bug:
"We've seen some questions in our community around the amount of written data using the Spotify client on desktop. These have been reviewed and any potential concerns have now been addressed in version 1.0.42, currently rolling out to all users."
The original story follows.
Are you finding that your hard drive has less free space that you'd expected? Check in on your Spotify files – they may be the source, thanks to a junk-file-creating bug.
For around five months, and perhaps longer, the leading music streaming app has been writing hundreds of gigabytes to users' hard drives, even while the app idles and isn't caching streamed playbacks.
The Spotify forums are full of complainants, and Ars Technica has also independently verified the bug.
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Spot of bother for SSD owners
As if using up precious disk space wasn't bad enough, it's a doubly problematic issue for SSD owners.
Solid state drives have a finite write capacity – writing and overwriting files on the drive will eventually see the SSD conk out and die. If terabytes of data are being written and re-written, unbeknownst to the user, that could significantly shorten the life of an SSD.
Some users affected by the problem are stating that the very latest build of the desktop application – 1.0.42 -– has rectified the issue in the past day. But, with Spotify drip-feeding the rollout of the update, it may be worth removing the application until the new build goes worldwide.
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