Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson, the Icelandic strongman who played “The Mountain” in Game of Thrones, recently made the news after he broke a world record by deadlifting 996 lbs, or approximately 451 kg worth of Phison SSDs. Each SSD have a capacity of 128TB, with the total combined storage capacity totalling a staggering 283 Petabytes.
The deadlift attempt was part of a partnership with Phison and Vdura, the latter being an AI and high-performance computing infrastructure company, and was done as part of a promotion of the former’s D205V enterprise drives. It should be noted that this isn’t the heaviest that Hafþór has ever lifted; the man set the world record back in 2020 when he deadlifted a total weight of 1,104 lbs or 500kg, back in his home country of Iceland.
The weight of the entire setup, by the way, includes the weight of the reinforced metal bar and the specially designed silver dollar boxes on each end to hold the SSDs.
The SSDs themselves aren’t slouches either. On paper, they weigh less than 200g, run on PCIe Gen5, and offer sequential read and write speeds of 14,600MB/s and 3,200MB/s, respectively. Basically, they’re some of the fastest enterprise-grade SSDs on the market, and the attempt with The Mountain is clearly a marketing gimmick to get folks to notice the product.
(Source: VDURA via YouTube, Tom’s Hardware)
