This issue is specific to the 8600 series and only occurs with Mac OS 8.0 and Mac OS 8.1. Apple is investigating a solution. If you remove the Energy Saver extension, when sleep is chosen the disk will spin down, and only when a key is pressed will it spin up again.
However, you will not be able to use the scheduled Sleep/Startup/Shut Down features without the extension. Basically, you will need to decide if immediate sleep with hard drive spin down is more important than the scheduled options.