I found that playing with either:
(sysctl) vfs.zfs.txg.write_limit_override
or
(boot/loader.conf) vfs.zfs.txg.timeout=5 (boot/loader.conf) vfs.zfs.txg.synctime=5
Helped with the write problem. What seems to happen is that zfs' calculations goslightly wrong if you have a lot of RAM and therefore zfs buffers too much,forcing so many writes that you lose all read IO for a few seconds....