You remember floppy disks, don’t you? Those truly floppy (hence the name) disks of thin plastic, which we all used to store and transfer files with before we had the Internet and USB thumb drives.

Today in 1930, one of the most significant people ever in the computer storage industry, was born. Alan Shugart sadly passed away in 2006, but he leaves an impressive legacy of work, starting out at IBM and later cofounding Seagate. We wanted, in his memory, to take a look at the first floppy drive.

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Today, just about all computers have hard drives. In fact, in the last quarter of 2011, global hard drive shipments reached approximately 125 million units. But what was the situation like back in the 1970s? Personal computers were (almost) unheard of, and computers were typically large as rooms and run by guys in white lab coats.

Aren’t you curious to find out just how big the global market for hard drives was back then? Let’s find out.

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The cloud storage war is heating up. Dropbox is getting more and more competition, and now Google has joined the fray with Google Drive. We’re not going to compare features in this article, but rather test something we can actually measure. And since we here at Pingdom do site monitoring we have focused on how these services compare in terms of performance and reliability.

To make this survey even more interesting, we also added two other file hosting services: Microsoft’s SkyDrive and Box.com. They should give us some additional perspective.

To monitor reliability and performance, in this specific case we thought their homepages were less important than the actual file hosting they offer, so that is what we focused on. We uploaded the same identical file to the four services, a small PNG image, and made it publicly available so we could monitor it.

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Google’s Dropbox competitor is finally here. At 09:30 PST, we detected that the drive.google.com website went live.

The interwebs have been buzzing with talk about this for a long time. Some of the earliest mentions of this service go back to 2006, so Google Drive has been many years in the making.

The recent intensity of the buzzing made us set up monitoring to see if we could catch Google in the act, so to speak. And now we have.

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Today is World Backup Day so why not heed the call and get busy protecting your precious files?

Plus, tomorrow is April 1st, so get ahead of all the pranks, and do it today.

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Do you have a big screen TV in your living room? Of course you do! Do you browse the web using that TV? Probably not, but you will sooner or later.

With sales figures for TVs that can connect to the Internet increasing fast, it’s time to start thinking about how your websites will look and work for someone sitting on a couch in front of a 60″ HDTV.

What kind of adjustments to your site’s design and functionality will you have to do? Read on to find out.

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Pingdom’s Mobile Podcast is a weekly show about Internet, web, and mobile stuff.

In this show, Saleh also gives us an update on the pending submission of his Carbon for Windows Phone Twitter client. We’re also joined by Mario Lurig, who talks about using Amazon S3 and Cloudfront to speed up a website.

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HDD or SSD, that is the question. Do you want the speed that the Solid-State Drive offers or the value and storage space the Hard Disk Drive can give you? That is an issue facing many computer buyers today.

Although the price of SSD has fallen quite dramatically recently there is still no doubt that you get a lot more storage space for the money you spend on an HDD. So, when will SSD be as cheap as HDD?

We took a look at how prices for HDD and SSD have developed over the last few years and here’s what we found.

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Big data has become one the new buzzwords on the Internet. It refers to the massive amounts of data that many modern web services deal with. This post will list some of the more useful software available to web developers for working with big data.

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Amazon recently published some numbers showing how Amazon S3 (Amazon’s “cloud-based” storage service) has grown over the years. They even included a chart, which you can see here below, which clearly shows how the number of objects stored in S3 has exploded.

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