A fast boot may be a good thing, but putting an ssd in a laptop seems strange to me. Except for people like karim who may do a lot of demos to clients, using virtualization technologies, a laptop is not the type of machine who has the highest need of fast i/o.
My own laptop...err netbook (currently a linux machine) is most of the time in suspend to ram mode, so I don't really need a fast boot. I think this need of a fast boot in opensolaris is just a testimony of the weak points of opensolaris as a laptop os. It is lacking a good sleep and suspend to disk mode to make it a good opensolaris os and I know that I won't convert my laptop to opensolaris until this issue is adressed. It may also accelerate applications startup but I'm not sure the additionnal cost would really make it worth. I would still prefer to have my complete music library at hand when travelling, and it wouldn't fit in a 32 or 64GB drive. Maybe in a few years or so when 256GB drive will be affordable, I'll consider this idea on a laptop. In any case, don't buy a cheap ssd. The cheapest ones on the market are not really faster than regular drive according to benchmarks. Intel X25 drives, though very efficient in our servers, are just too costly for personnal usage. For a laptop or desktop, I would consider Samsung P22J series or OCZ Vertex and summit series as they seem to be the best compromise in term of performance/price ratio. I'm contemplating the idea for my opensolaris desktop machine which I stress much more with compilations and frequent virtual test machines creations destructions and I know I can keep the huge multimedia and less i/o intensive data on big usb external drives. Regards Thomas
