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Famed for its vast array of torrents and infamous within the film, television and music industries, The Pirate Bay has become one of the most well known and infamous torrent sites on the web.

Following its recent switch to the using magnet links however, its also become far more space efficient. So much so, one user decided to take the entire library of Pirate Bay torrent links and condense them onto a single USB flash drive.

With over 1.6 million torrents, it’s easy to see the appeal for those who are fans of file sharing and depending on the files in question, easy to understand why such a site would be likely to come under fire from big content creators.

The site made the switch to using magnet links alongside switching its domain extension from ‘.org’ to ‘.se’, as to avoid US-based legal issues (see 2009). As a result of the switchover however, the site’s physical size has been greatly reduced.

By switching to magnet links, The Pirate Bay can more legitimately call itself a torrent search engine, as torrents are no longer hosted directly from the site. The database of 1.64 million magnet links is also dramatically smaller as a result and this has enabled one user to compress the entire site’s torrent library down to a minuscule 90MB.

User ‘allisfine’ created a simple script which aggregated the site’s 1,643,194 magnet links including seeds, ID, leechers and file size and created a single 164MB uncompressed file (or 90MB when compressed).

Aside from this impressive feat, ‘allisfine’ has essentially created a carbon copy of The Pirate Bay ensuring that should it encounter any severe legal action, (despite its recent preventative measures), other users will still be able to access its vast library of shared content.

Source | Via