300 Years of Porn? Reddit User Puts Amazon's Promise to the Test

Amazon claims its cloud storage capacity is “unlimited,” prompting one resourceful enthusiast to test it with millions of gigabytes of porn.

In March, 2015, Amazon introduced an extremely low-cost cloud storage plan: for $11.99 a year it offered unlimited photo storage and for $59.99 a year it gave you unlimited storage for literally everything. Amazon dropped its prices amid heavy competition – its previous top-tier offering was 1TB/year for $500.

However, one user called Beaston02 from Reddit was skeptical about how ‘limitlessness’ the storage actually was. To test its capacity he uploaded 1.8 petabytes (almost 2 million gigabytes!) of porn to the cloud storage, which took him about 6 months. Oddly enough, the cloud drive handled it pretty well.

But the question naturally arises: how can one man have such an enormous collection of porn? Being passionate about coding and archiving big amounts of data, Beaston02 wrote a set of scripts that recorded and downloaded terabytes of public webcam shows from a variety of adult cam sites.

"It is nearly entirely porn," Beaston02 told Motherboard about his epic archive in a Reddit message. "Ever since I got into computers, I found myself learning more, and faster when it was something more interesting. Call me crazy, but women interest me more than most other things on the internet and there is a huge amount of data being created daily, so it was a good fit for the project.”

Another Reddit user counted that if the videos were of 720p, it would take 900,000 hours, or 102 years of straight calendar time to watch them. However, they are likely to be of a worse quality, say, 480p, as streams aren’t normally broadcast in HD quality. That's around 0.7 gigabytes per hour, or 293 years and six months, meaning it would take several lifetimes to watch it all.

By the way, Beaston02 does not think of himself as a pervert or that he is obsessed with porn: “I have more of a problem with collecting or hoarding data than I do with porn," he said.

Why did Beaston02 stop? He explained that he had used the “porn project” as an exercise to learn Python, SQL databases, and how to handle that much data.

"The project ran its course, I got the knowledge I was hoping to get, and I just had no interest in it anymore."

In June, 2017, Amazon sunsetted its unlimited cloud storage plan for Amazon Drive. It is unclear whether Beaston02 had any influence upon this decision or not.