Spotify excessively writes to drives

I recently noticed that something was writing a lot of data to my SSD so I started looking trough what could be causing it, and Spotify ended up being the culprit, it was writing close to 10GB an hour to my drive at one point.

I checked the I/O write data with the S.M.A.R.T data on my drive and it wrote 28.305.469.806 Bytes of data in about 2 and a half hours, I’ve also noticed that it only writes the data when playing music, still completely unacceptable.

I just reinstalled and tested again, and got it to use 1GB in 17 minutes. (and according to S.M.A.R.T that was indeed written to my SSD)

and another one using 320MB in 4-5 minutes.

While this is a heavier usecase than I would typically present to Spotify.

The issue at hand seems to be that it tries to cache every song you play as when I went back to a song that I played at the start of the tests it wouldn’t go up, but that still doesn’t explain that one time it used 28GB (or about 26GiB) while listening to a song on auto replay.

I didn’t have this problem a couple of months ago, but started noticing it around may.

I’m very disappointed with this issue because it makes me have to avoid software I used to love.

Source: Spotify