I want to reduce strain on my ssd

If you mean the downloads directory, Settings Button > Files and it's near the top.

If you mean the .dat files that DarkMX saves for it's config, you can run DarkMX in portable mode in a location of your chosing and it will save the files right alongside the .exe.  Make an empty text file "darkmx_portable_mode.txt" next to your darkmx.exe and re-start the program.

OP might know this, but also for the information of anyone who might come across this thread, DarkMX doesn't really save much in it's config files.  You can watch the last-mod times increment and multiply by the file size to get the actual bandwidth.  Even with a huge library, there's not much in the config files, not even hash fields.  Just file titles.  If you're running a very busy DarkMX network, that might use a bit more disk resource for user file collection caching, but even that would be pretty minimal, especially for an SSD.