Seconding the heat dissipator. This is the easiest option, you can usually just rip it off any electronic scrap you may have laying around or can find easily, and while it would be nice to have new thermal paste, you should be able to just salvage whatever is still stuck to it. It’ll work well enough for a while. As an alternative, you can throttle disk read/write speeds. Just not globally, not really. Option 1: Cgroups. Depending on distro you either already have some cgroups set up, or you should be able to set them up; and then just set max read/write speed for each group. After setting control groups you can wrap your command in ionice to set the command to that group. ionice -c3 Option 2: If you only notice this during file transfers and not during normal tasks, use a compatible file transfer application that lets you limit bandwidth, for example for rsync: rsync --bwlimit=1024 source/ destination/