The MongoDB Blog series "Weather of the Century" explores the performance implications of deploying MongoDB in different ways, using the ISD (Integrated Surface Data) dataset. The dataset contains 2.5 billion weather observations and requires significant storage and processing power. Two deployments were tested: "The Death Star", a single server with a large disk, and "The Force", a massive cluster with everything in RAM. Bulk loading performance was measured, with optimal results found at 8 threads and a batch size of 100 documents for The Death Star, achieving an insert rate of 85,000 documents per second. In contrast, The Force achieved a peak throughput of 220,000 document inserts per second with 144 threads and a batch size of 200, but was limited by network bandwidth. The results highlight the trade-offs between vertical and horizontal scaling and provide insights into MongoDB's performance capabilities.