ZFS minimizing writes on zroot? maximizing life of usb zroot?

I have a couple of sandisk usb cruzers (32 GB) that are acting as zroot. One has gone bad in the mirror set and I need to replace it ASAP. It may or may not be due to excessive writing ( I have no idea is all ). Update: FreeBSD 11.1.

What I would like to do is two-fold. First, I want to what I can do to minimize writes in zroot. Second, I wanted to see if there is a way I could actually have required files for boot on zroot, but have most everything else residing as an overlay on my main storage volume (tank). I hope this makes sense - basically I want to maximize the life of the usb drives as well as possible.

TIA
 
There's very little being written to /. Some bits obviously are, like /home/, /var/ and /tmp/. But besides those three there's nothing to write to on a running system.

That said, check if you have atime turned off. Updating the access time will definitely cause a lot of writes. So be sure to turn that off.
 
I don't have any advice for you on how to minimize writes on zfs, but...

If you have those SanDisk Ultra USB3.0 32GB (sdcz48-032g) that can be pushed in/out,
then you'd probably want to get something else.
Had two of them for testing FreeBSD on my wifes tablet and with a single svnlite checkout I killed the first one.

I don't even used zfs, just ufs.
Thought I was just unlucky with the first one and bought another one...
Went blazing fast from a few read/write errors to completely smoked as with the first one.
Couldn't find out if they use TLC flash, but I guess they do and it makes them weak.

All my older flash drives of 8GB (before TLC was invented) from different brands have handled the use as OS-drive for years and survived the SanDisks by far.
 
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