If I install just my OS and whatever necessary on a 20-30 Gb solid state hard drive, shouldn't it boot up faster?

Yes it should. While the benefits of solid state devices are HUGE, the cost is a bit pervasive to most users AND the amount of things that can go wrong with power surges and outages make me leery about using it. I also believe that SSD’s have a limited amount of writes, and while the amount is rather large if you’re using it for your OS it may be quicker to get to this point especially if you have a pagefile or swap partition on it, which you most likely will. All-in-all I’d be leery.

Here is some info::
http://lowendmac.com/bookrev/08br/0502.html#8

Oh wow. I read the article that that article linked too. looks like SSD’s still have a long ways to go. thanks jp

Well, however, if you can put in two SSD’s in Raid 0 array, then you’ve got something. It also depends on the drives. Mtron Pro’s look pretty fast.
Here is a different story:
http://www.nextlevelhardware.com/storage/battleship/
The benchmarks that they use can make a difference too.