Net Tech Term: half-life

[Keefe]

Also called life expectancy or shelf life, the time it takes for a data-storing medium to lose half of its strength. Floppy disks and magnetic hard drives have a half life of between five and seven years. Optical media, such as CD-Rs, have a half life of about 30 years.

The term comes from the scientific fields where it means the amount of time it takes for half of something to undergo a process or the amount of time it takes for half of the atoms of a radioactive substance to disintegrate.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/54/32593.html


these folks are saying that the halflife of Cd's is significantly lower than what was first said. Still I'ld wait to run out and back everthing up to 3 1/2" floppies until I heard some more verifiable reports.

ditto on the CDRs thing, alot lower than 30 years they're saying