Since Aurora is a netbook/laptop oriented distro, I think it's important we make sure there aren't processes acting up and causing frequent disk writes, which prevents hard drives from spinning down and reduces battery life. Here's what I'm observing on my system (1005PE) using iotop while idle and on battery:

jdb2 writes to disk every few seconds:
This seems to be a kernel-related bug affecting multiple distros. jdb2 has to do with EXT4 journaling. Theoretically it should only write to disk when file changes occur, but instead it's writing all the time. There is a bug report here (for Ubuntu):
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+sour ... bug/607560

Other processes that write frequently are:
gconfd-2
upowerd
winbindd
flush-8:0

Is anyone else seeing these issues? Any ideas on how to stop these processes from writing to disk so frequently?

Have you looked at PowerTop (see http://www.lesswatts.org/projects/powertop/)? This will show you some of this activity, and it gives suggested changes to reduce it.

I am using IOTop to track processes accessing the hard drive. PowerTop's info won't be as relevant. I don't have this excessive hdd access problem with other distros like Puppeee and Fuduntu. With those distros my hdd is pretty much always spun down, unless I'm actively opening/saving a file. My point is that Aurora should implement advanced power saving by default, and any bugs causing excessive hdd reads/writes should be ironed out. Of course the latest Aurora build used by the devs is probably much changed from the public beta I'm using, so the issues I'm seeing might already be ironed out. I just wanted to bring attention to them in case they've been overlooked.