‘The Mountain’ deadlifts a record-breaking 283PB of storage at SC24 — picks up 996 pounds (452kg) of Phison 128TB SSDs

“The Mountain” from Game of Thrones, AKA Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson, has succeeded in deadlifting 282.624 PB of SSDs. At a somewhat incongruous but crowd-pleasing event at SC24 in Atlanta earlier this week, the strongman broke the “deadlift of data” record with his stupendous feat. For those curious about the physical mass of the data – including the bar, silver dollar boxes, and mammoth quantity of Phison Pascari D205V PCIe Gen5 122.88TB class drives – the total deadlift weight was 996 pounds (~452kg).

282PB of data is a huge amount of 0s and 1s. Using more familiar units of storage, it is 282,000 TB, or 282,000,000 GB of data. If you were to use the storage to archive DVD movies of approximately 4GB each, for example, you would be able to squirrel away 70.4 million of them on the silver dollar deadlifted data cache. These figures illustrate the astronomical data densities technology is delivering in 2024. And remember, the reinforced metal bar and custom silver dollar boxes would be pretty heavy for most people, even when empty.

We wouldn’t want to cast shade on the 282PB deadlift of data achieved by Björnsson. However, 996 lbs isn’t an astounding weight in the silver dollar deadlift world. According to the World Deadlifting Council, Rauno Heinla has successfully hoisted a mass of 1,279 lbs in this deadlift fashion.

The silver dollar deadlift SC24 event wasn’t organized for the love of the sport, of course. AI and HPC infrastructure company VDURA organized and sponsored it, collaborating with flash storage tech leader Phison. Earlier, we mentioned that the silver dollar boxes were stuffed with Phison’s awesome Pascari D205V drives.

Phison’s PCIe Gen5 enterprise-grade devices can hold 122.88TB each and promise a sequential read speed of up to 14,600 MB/s and a sequential write speed of up to 3,200 MB/s. They also promise a random read performance of 3,000K 4K IOPS and 35K random write 16K IOPS. Our back-of-a-napkin calculation indicates that these huge-capacity D205V drives weigh less than 0.44 pounds (200g) each.

Considering the above astounding numbers, we wish the world of consumer SSDs would pick up the pace and make drives greater than 4TB more commonplace. If you are interested in maxing out your PC storage, though, you can find a bargain WD_Black SN850X 8TB drive highlighted in our Black Friday SSD and Storage Deals Live blog.