[zja]

> This architecture has a variety of advantages including increased security, no need for patching, fast upgrades and recovery.

SmartOS was developed by Joyent for their cloud computing product, it's primary use case isn't desktop computing. I think the advantages mentioned above were probably a bigger factor than the disk space. I would also guess that PXE would be the standard way to boot in a datacenter, not USB.

[jama211]

Fair enough