SSD is my primary (boot) drive. SSD is 500GB with a guaranteed 500mb read and write speed, and my hard drive is a 2TB 7200rpm drive. As I said, I would like to keep my documents folder on the HDD to conserve space on my SSD.
Ahhh -- probably exactly the same situation, but the problem is the speed difference between the SSD and the HDD. The game will be "streaming" assets from the SSD to RAM...but it will need to slow way, waaay,
waaaaaay down to save the game to the HDD.
Two options:
1.) Either move the Documents back to the SSD...
or...
2.) Try moving your virtual memory to the HDD as well. While this may not work at all...it might also mitigate or erase the stuttering.
(Personally, I'd go for "option
1.)". You really want games as big and complex as TW3, Fallout 4, [Whatever] Total War, Elite: Dangerous, ArmA [XYZ], etc. to be running exclusively on an SSD. They need to move
large packets of data around on-demand...so it serves no purpose at all to run any part of these games on slower drives.
I'd recommend using the HDD for general storage and to run games that are less than 20 GB when installed. As a ballpark.
Is there a way to tell the game to use a different directory for game saves?
Depends entirely on the game. Many (if not most) will use a file structure somewhere under
...\[UserAccount]\Documents...
Some...interesting...(read:
annoying)...titles will hide their saves somewhere under the
AppData directory. (I am not a fan nor a supporter of this, as it's both cheeky and prone to stupid errors.)
Older games will normally have a
'Saved Game' folder right in the installation directory. This is perfectly fine, but I actually like the
Documents approach better, as it works (in practice) sort of like an auto-backup. If the game is saved in the installation directory, there's always a good chance that an accidental modifiction to the installation could corrupt the saved game data.
