Let's change a process's IO niceness with ionice!
YES, as we get used to use nice to set the niceness of a process's CPU consumption when running a long task, we can nice the IO usage of it.
To start a process what only gets IO when nobody else needs it, just start it like
ionice -c 3 something.sh
"-c 3" sets it's class to Idle. Check out ionice's man page for more details.