Scheduled power-down?

I have a G4 Mac mini running OS X 10.4.x Server, providing File and Print Services to a bunch of machines here at our home. There's a 500GB Maxtor external drive plugged into the Mac mini, providing the storage for files the server is serving. This drive is broken into volumes (share points) that auto-mount on the desktop of the users (family members) when they log in to their respective client machines. This is all working beautifully.
My concern is that I have the Mac mini and the external drive powered up and running 24/7. While that's been no problem so far, I'm concerned the drive (which obviously is a consumer unit not intended to run all the time) will die, not to mention the unnecessary power usage when we're all asleep and the gentle humming noise coming from the study.
A couple times, I got into the habit of powering off the server and the drive when we went to bed, and switching them on in the morning. That works, except that the print service won't work until it's stopped and started again, which is a hassle given that the server runs headless.
Is it possible to schedule a power down (or sleep) of the external drive and/or Mac mini, and have everything still work when it powers up (or wakes)?
Thanks!

It's been my experience that problematic gear works better until and unless you start cycling the power -- running isn't so much an issue, it's the starting and stopping and heating and cooling cycles that was a bigger stress.
If the particular disk bothers you, replace it. Or mirror it. (Though as some large studies out of CMU, CERN, Google and elsewhere -- empirical studies, large numbers of widgets -- have found, commodity and enterprise gear tend to fail at about the same rates, and the vendor MTBF ratings for disks can tend to be quite optimistic.)
Or use one of the available USB-based or NAS-based (network) RAID storage controllers that are available on the market.
This is one of the reasons why I run the key gear on a less-interruptible power supply, too.

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