Linux: prioritize I/O

I've noticed despite being launched with the lowest priority, processes which are very I/O demanding can hog my system badly. I/O requests to the hard drive produced by a lowest priority tar xzvf, rpm update, etc. can make high priority applications launch terribly slow. What's even more bugging, Windows behaves much better at these siuations, so when the system is loaded with compression or similar tasks, it looks slower when running Linux.

Is there any way to prioritize I/O on Linux? Ideally, the priority of the process originating I/O should count for I/O scheduling.

>>4
Nice is for IO scheduling.