“The Mountain” from Game of Thrones sets world record by deadlifting 996 pounds of SSDs

In context: Game of Thrones was filled with gruesome scenes but one was particularly memorable and disturbing. In the episode aptly named “The Mountain and the Viper,” the character known as “The Mountain” engaged in a trial by combat against Oberyn “the Viper,” eventually winning by smashing Oberyn’s head in. Now, the winner has returned by smashing a new kind of record, deadlifting a colossal 996 pounds of Phison 128TB solid-state drives.

Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson, the actor who played the hulking character “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 the mammoth collection of Phison’s cutting-edge Pascari D205V 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. 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 – as calculated by the math whizzes over at Tom’s Hardware – is a testament to the immense engineering feats behind today’s highest-capacity drives.

Beyond 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 one 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 PR event.