Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson, the actor who played “The Mountain” in Game of Thrones, achieved an astonishing feat at the SC24 conference in Atlanta this week. Björnsson deadlifted a staggering 282.624 petabytes of solid-state storage, shattering the “deadlift of data” record in front of an awe-struck crowd. The total weight of the lift was 996 pounds, including a reinforced metal bar, specially designed silver dollar boxes, and a mammoth collection of Phison’s cutting-edge PCIe Gen5 122.88TB solid-state drives.
For most people, even the empty bar would be a struggle. The deadlift attempt was the brainchild of a partnership between Phison and Vdura, an AI and high-performance computing infrastructure company. The event was part serious lifting and part promotional showcase of Phison’s game-changing D205V enterprise drives.
The 996-pound record isn’t even the heaviest Björnsson has deadlifted.
Shattering the data lifting benchmark
In 2020, he set a world record by lifting 1,104 lb at Thor’s Power Gym in Iceland.
Still, the accomplishment highlights a different kind of achievement: the fact that those 122.88TB SSDs weigh less than half a pound each. This is a testament to the immense engineering feats behind today’s highest-capacity drives. Beyond their massive density and capacity, these Gen5 NVMe devices boast blistering performance fit for the most demanding data-intensive workloads.
They offer sequential read speeds up to 14,600 MB/s and sequential writes up to 3,200 MB/s. Meanwhile, the random read performance speed is 3,000K 4K IOPS with 35K random write 16K IOPS. These figures make them some of the fastest enterprise-grade SSDs in the world, so it’s no wonder Phison and Vdura wanted the world to take notice of the event.
