A typical response here would be, "Have you tried just switching out your main hard drive to a non-SSD and making that the default install location? Good luck!"

Go to Preferences -> Advanced Settings -> Change Cache Location

It's the VACUUM'ing of the SQLite database in that folder that's the problem. Moving that destination to your other drive should hopefully move the IO with it (I don't have a second drive to test with)

Also, they fixed this a couple months ago it seems. Page 22 of the comments in OP link.

I checked with some of my colleagues in work. My machine had 220GB written in 2 days. Another colleague had 300GB.

You can set the location of the cache in advanced settings IIRC.

It is not the cache that causes the heavy IO. It is the SQLite DB at AppData\Local\Spotify\mercury.db AppData\Local\Spotify\mercury.db-wal

See http://blog.scaleprocess.net/spotify-heavy-io-problem/

Besides that, a lot of times setting a diff location for your cache does NOT move the cache. I had to use a symlink.

Thanks for pointing that out. Even ignoring the excessive writes, it'll be nice to have the cache take up space on my vast spinny drive rather than on my somewhat tight SSD.

The folder isn't as large as the IO usage makes it out to be. The entire PersistentCache directory is only ~104MB on my drive, even with >300GB written in the last few days

Good to know. I assumed it would not be dozens of GBs, but I assumed it might be one or two.