Putting hard drives to sleep when idle?

Yes, putting the drive to sleep when idle will be less wear on a traditional drive. But! It will take a bit of time for the system to wake up which might be a bother.

You might want to look at upgrading to a SSD. Then you don't put the drive to sleep at all as it doesn't have any moving parts! And its a lot quicker waking up.

My home Mac mini is in desperate need of upgrading as well. I'm planning on swapping out the two 2 TB platter drives I currently have to a single Samsung 850 EVO 4 TB SSD drive. It should lower the power requirement and heat.