On linux there are a bunch of "laptop mode" configurations that can minimize the time the disk will be woken up to actually write out data. The price is that you'll lose the last N minutes of work on a hard crash. And it only works when you have enough RAM to avoid swapping and keep dirty pages in memory. And your workloads don't explicitly call fsync. But if setup correctly your drive will spend most of its time sleeping.
If you run ZFS, you can set sync=disabled for your filesystems. This will disable fsync.
Unlike most (all?) other filesystems, that's actually safe. ZFS doesn't reorder writes between transaction groups, so after a crash you'll get a consistent state from however many minutes ago.
(However, txgs have a time limit of 5 seconds by default. You also need to increase that.)
As it relates to the Mac's, I'm starting to wonder if their SMART reporting is just faulty. Power on Hours seems to be definitively wrong, I'm starting to wonder if all of the SMART data is bogus and there is no issue.
Does anyone know why power on hours seem to be under reported so often?