Would it help to speed up a developer workstation to put in a second drive and set up a windows software RAID-1 or RAID-0 (i.e. disk mirroring / striping)? In theory the system could distribute it's reads over both drives, giving almost twice the performance in the best case. But how much does it help in practice? Any numbers?
I am especially interested in your experience with startup times of application servers and if there is a significant speedup of software builds, and on performance when the build / server is running in background.
CLARIFICATION: I am not talking about production servers - I'm just wondering whether this would be a cheap way to speed up the compile-deploy-test cycle when developing an application. Data safety is not important in this context - that's what backups are for.