The fix is to go into System Preferences » Startup Disk and select your new solid-state drive. This prevents a 30-second timeout before the boot starts.
Upgrading to a SSD is easy, if a bit expensive. I'd suggest turning your brand-new SSD into a temporary external USB drive using a Universal HDD USB Adapter from Apricorn or NewerTech and format it as HFS Extended Journaled, 1 partition, with Disk Utility. You can then clone your hard drive to it with Carbon Copy Cloner, making sure you are logged in as a administrative user who does *not* have FileVault enabled. Then open up the Mac (using instructions from iFixit.com) and swap the two drives. Set the startup drive and you're done.
[crarko adds: I haven't tested this one. Obviously when you connect a new boot device you should be sure it is selected as your Startup Disk, or the system will experience a delay while it searches for a bootable System, sometimes including a network boot device which can take a while until it times out.]

