Solid State Drives

I'm toying with the idea of builing a new computer. I've never done this before so I'm hoping it will be fun and not a pull your hair out omfg what have I done kind of thing.

the first thing I'm researching is a solid state drive. I've watched a couple youtube videos and these things are incredible.

I haven't been able to find out the answers to some questions though - like what their memory retention is like. I'm not positive on how they operate and store data, so if I store something on there and leave for a year/5 years/10 years is there any issue with that?

Also correct me if I'm wrong but the reason we have RAM is because of the latency and I/O times it takes to get data to and from the HDD. I've heard SSD's as being referred to as RAM-Drives as well.

Does this mean an SSD will preclude the need for RAM? Or is the motherboard architectured in a way such that RAM speed will still be faster?

Any good web site references or while papers (that can be understood by the common man) would be appreciated. I'm all wiki'ed out.

SSD's will not replace RAM. RAM will always be faster.

The devices use a more reliable form of flash memory, IIRC, and play little tricks with cache to speed things up a little, but they are certainly slower than the volatile memory in your RAM sticks.

It is non-volatile, though, so theoretically, they will store your information for much longer than its actual worth.