Unfortunately, the article is behind the paywall. I'd really like to know how many reads their backend makes, when you shuffe around your library. I have already 3 dead SD cards on my hands and they only had spotify library on them. duh...
Since the mobile apps and desktop app share a lot of code, you could if you wanted profile the desktop app in similar scenarios to guesstimate usage patterns. As long as you remember that the desktop app will also load more data (bigger screen, so more data to handle), it should be fine.
Somehow, you could compare it to a browser usage pattern. There's some index, some various files that are cached...
My guess in your case is bad quality SD card or bad SD drivers / reader.
Then it puzzles me why 3 cards are dead. I suppose they do not optimize their shuffle to pick a song from an already read flash page, so many shuffles -> many read disturbs -> page refresh (move to a fresh page, mark old as garbage) -> garbage collection -> repeat 1000x -> card death. Maybe, this is also amplified by bad drivers and bad cards, as you've said. Sadly, none of these are open source. sigh...
