First reported by Tom's Hardware, Icelandic strongman Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson—who won the 2019 World's Strongest Man competition and played Gregor "The Mountain" Clegane in Game of Thrones—has completed a 996 lbs "deadlift of data," hoisting thousands of next-generation, 128 terabyte SSDs at the SD24 computing conference. With each drive likely to command north of $10,000 once they come to market, this has to be the most expensive deadlift ever performed.
The stunt was organized by HPC infrastructure company VDURA and hard drive manufacturer Phison, which provided the drives in question. The marketing stunt was meant to call attention to Phison's monster capacity 128TB SSDs, which are targeting the datacenter market. Björnsson specifically performed a "silver dollar" deadlift, where a barbell is hooked to two large crates—originally loaded with silver dollars for weight when the event first appeared at early World's Strongest Man competitions.
But it wasn't silver dollars in Björnsson's crates, it was a near half ton of Phison's next-gen SSDs. According to VDURA's press release about the lift, it was 282 petabytes of data, which translates to 282,000 terabytes—Björnsson would never have needed to worry about the size of his Steam library again if he had just walked off with the barbell after locking out. Good luck getting it through doorways though, and I'd hate to see the fees Icelandair would hit you with for 996 lbs of checked baggage.
But indulge me in some more back of the napkin math, if you would. We don't yet know how much the enterprise-oriented 128TB class of SSDs is going to cost, but looking over at TechRadar's homework, manufacturer Solidigm's 62TB SSD targeting the same segment is priced at a reasonable $7,000, with a 128TB drive from the same company likely to command $14,000—that's also in line with the pricing of a lot of consumer SSDs, which can be anywhere from $40-$90 a terabyte.
If we take $14,000 as our ballpark price for the 2,303 individual Phison SSDs Björnsson lifted, that means he hoisted $32 million worth of storage. There have been heavier deadlifts than 996 lbs—Björnsson's even performed some of them—but has a lifter ever hoisted a more expensive barbell or other implement in the long history of strength sports? I don't see how it's possible.
Now we just have to wait for Björnsson's longtime strongman and boxing rival, 2017 World's Strongest Man Eddie Hall, to deadlift 2,304 mondo-expensive SSDs on behalf of Samsung or Solidigm or someone, setting a new "deadlift of data" world record and reigniting the rivalry between the two massive men.
