As I mentioned in my previous post, I found out that my Windows installation was all sorts of screwed up. Even though I was using an SSD to house Windows, it somehow messed up its own installation and put its own bootloader on my Western Digital Green HDD. Given that those drives are meant to be energy efficient, they run at a slower speed than they should, so my boot times slowed down a bit. Additionally, the HDD had to spin up every time the computer booted even if I wasn't using any data on it, making my computer a bit noisier and decreasing the lifespan of the HDD.
With all that in mind, I got a new Toshiba P300 drive. It's a 3 TB spinning disk running at 7200 RPM, so it's significantly larger and faster than my old HDD. After a short delay due to a personal trip and the start of classes, I backed up my files using SpiderOak, wiped all three drives in my desktop, and re-installed both operating systems. I used the plan that I mentioned in my last post where I put Windows on the smaller SSD because it would have more space on the hard drive, and so far it seems to be working out. Small programs and utilities such as MalwareBytes, Notepad++, and Python all installed on the SSD with plenty of space to spare, whereas my files and Steam library will be housed on the HDD.
As for Linux, I installed Void on the larger SSD, which gives it plenty of room for absolutely everything. This website is running on a 25 GB SSD partition that I've used less than 10% of, so I think 240 GB for a lightweight distro like Void will be just fine. However, I also partitioned off 1/3 of the Toshiba disk as ext4 so I can use it for Linux storage. That has yet to be set up for use, but it will have its own fstab entry so that it is mounted at boot. I'm also going to stick with XFCE as I don't want to keep messing with i3 and various taskbars (i3bar, polybar, tint2, etc) to get the functionality I need. However, before I can do any of that I need to go through the same process I did previously, as the Void bootloader hasn't been detected by my system BIOS. Now that I know what I'm doing, it should be much easier to add it.
Overall, the new setup feels quite nice. Games load much faster since I have them stored on a faster drive, boot times have improved, and I have much more storage available than I did previously. The old drive is currently unused, but since it's been wiped clean (and I may overwrite it from /dev/zero for security) I have the very beginnings of a second desktop build, including my old GTX 750 Ti in case graphics are a problem. However, that won't happen for a while if at all, and I most likely won't document it here as I'm already repeating the same tasks over and over. Next update should involve something more administration-related, as I have a few projects in mind - including a NextCloud server and a Raspberry Pi Zero network cluster.