Which SSD even gets warm to the touch!? The guy has no idea what he's talking about. Get a quality SSD and you'll be fine. P.S. - Stay away from Best Buy "nerd squad".
SSD's are essential hard versions of USB flash drives. Its very different to volatile RAM such as system memory. The main issue is limited write cycles, having your pagefile and temporary files on the SSD can be bad! (although better for speed). Ideally, you'd get the fastest SSD possible, because lets face it, you bought it for the speed! and place your pagefile in its own little partition (say 8gb or so) at the beginning of a mechanical hard drive. The hard drive should not be an eco drive etc, it should be a fully fledged 7200RPM drive. The new 1tb platter Seagate drives should be quite good for this. The temporary files then can be put into a temp folder along with the rest of the files. Putting the pagefile on its own little drive (and having it the only thing on that drive) means its not only in the fastest part of the drive, but it can't get fragmented either (and if it does somehow, 2 or 3 fragments in a 4gb+ file, assuming you leave windows to automatically adjust it, won't cause any detriment to performance. So, in this scenario, the SSD is used purely as a 'read' drive for the OS and the programs you want to load quickly. Of course, some writing still takes place, but its limited enough not to cause damage to the drive.
Got my first SSD in March this year.... No issues and much improved performance. I will be purchasing my second in January. I will use the Vertex 3 as an OS drive, The Vertex 2 to load a few games onto and my 2TB drive as a general storage as well as installing any additional games onto and a 1TB for personal data/work backups/wifes backups which is in turn backed up onto another drive that that is stored elsewhere for redundancy's sake. Might seem a little ott but no drive mechanical or otherwise flawless and Microsoft has demonstrated that no cloud server is flawless so the best bet is just to back important stuff up in multiple places. I'd say get the SSD, it'll change your life, and just keep backed up.
The guy at BestBuy handed me a GeForce 8600GT box when I said I wanted a 8800 GT. He said this was the same thing...just the box was different. I've had them tell me some rather insane things as well... My cousin is a manager for Geek Squad at BestBuy. How much does he know about computers? Not much. He thinks side windows for cases are awesome and super high end. They also managed to not fix what was wrong with my computer, 50$ Inspection fee, back when I was new to computers. Ended up just being a simple wire placement.
SSD is terrific technology! Take one, without any concerns. The only thing I dont like about it is the price.
My Intel G80 is running like hell and is 1,5 years old. Checking withh SSDlife give me another 8 years of operation. Change your supplyer and buy the SSD, you'll never regret it. You know how they say: "Once you go black you never turn back":flip2::heh:.
My Vertex 2E is great. Its been running for 16 months without a problem. Estimated Lifespan is 8 years 2 months 2 days. I occasionally boot Windows on a hard drive and wonder how I ever thought it was ok!
