Reducing I/O operations for often-updating data in MariaDB
There are two sources of write I/O when updating table data: transaction log flushes and checkpoints (dirty buffer pool page flushes). You cannot do much about the former, as it happens every time you commit, apart from placing your log onto faster storage.

Checkpoint activity can be somewhat configured (for InnoDB) by adjusting innodb_max_dirty_pages_pct, innodb_adaptive_flushing*, innodb_adaptive_checkpoint, and innodb_io_capacity parameters, among others -- there are some more details in this blog post. You'll need to monitor checkpoint activity to figure out what changes make sense in your situation.