Spotify shortened the life expectancy of your computers and smartphones without your knowledge – 01net.com

A software that kills the hard drives : this is an advertisement which Spotify would have gone well. Spotted by users and is brought to the attention of the public by our colleagues of Ars Technica, a bug that affected the famous music service, is responsible if this is death, in all cases the decrease of the life expectancy of many hard drives, SSD and other memory modules flash smartphone. Recognized by Spotify and a priori now patched this bug that 3 journalists at Ars Technica were able to found was forced Spotify to write 5 Gb to 10 Gb per hour. Where is the problem ? SSDS are not a much better technological solution ? the

lifetime of the flash memory

ssdendurancetest.com – sites like SSDendurancetest measure the life span of SSD drives. And the differences between some models are huge !

The passage of hard drives with platters and read heads to the flash memory is, indeed, a very large technical progress. Compared to hard drives, flash memory is faster, more stable in time, (almost) insensitive to shocks and, more compact.

But this force has setbacks : in addition to the price, still well above the disk tray, flash memory chip, that is found both in SSDS to our PC in the onboard memory and memory cards of our smartphones, have a limited life span. A duration that is measured not in units of time but the amount of data written.

Each cell in a data storage of the flash memory can be rewritten a number of times before becoming unusable. At Samsung, for example, the duration of life between the series 850 Pro and 850 EVO goes from simple to double : when a SSD 850 PRO 256 Gb (technology MLC, 2bits/cell) is guaranteed to 150 Tb written (TBW, terabytes written), the equivalent 850 EVO (TLC, 3 bits/cell) is guaranteed for “only” 75 To written.
A month writing 10 Gb per hour (10 x 24 x 30 = 7.2 Tb) would open and the life expectancy of the disk EVO of almost 10% of its lifetime warranty.

Problem solved… for the moment

With such allegations, Spotify was quick to respond. First of all, when a spokesperson for the brand has ended up by responding (with two days of delay and after the publication of the article…) to our colleagues of Ars Technica that an update was being rolled out. Then by making the update in question. It was available on the morning of November 14, 2016 (force the installation by going to “Help”, “about Spotify”, “Click here to download”, wait for the download, close and restart Spotify).
If it is to be hoped that this bug does not corresponds to be not in Spotify, this episode will have at least had the interest to bring to public knowledge that the storage drives flash are not immortal. And relaunch the debate on the importance of providing disks of removable storage on the electronic devices to put a brake on planned obsolescence.