I read this blog every day, but don’t post very often. I’ve had quite a bit of experience with SSD’s in Apple’s newer laptops, both in the ones that you can configure it to ship with, and in upgrading conventional hard drives to SSD’s. There is a pretty good performance gain going to an SSD drive, even over a 7200RPM drive. OS boot times are roughly cut in half, operation inside the OS is also snappier.
Reliability has been absolutely great so far (knock on wood). Though my hands on experience is limited to the rebranded Samsung’s that ship with CTO Apple laptops, Intel, and Kingston SSD’s.
I think a SSD might be a good answer for what you are looking to do, build times that are being limited by disk.
