DiskMaster vs SMART Sniffer

DiskMaster is a free desktop application for monitoring drive health on Windows, Linux, and macOS. It reads SMART attributes, self-tests, and test logs, then calculates a health score out of 100 and shows which attributes account for deductions; performance has a separate score. It stores readings in SQLite and charts changes, with alerts for shifts such as increasing drive counters. A read-only surface scan times blocks, rereads unreadable sectors for confirmation, and maps them to sectors. DiskMaster can identify files associated with those sectors and try to rescue copies while skipping unreadable bytes. Optional repair tools include sector and filesystem repair, zero-fill, and sanitizing bad sectors the filesystem marks as free. Alerts can go to Slack, Discord, ntfy, email, desktop notifications, commands, or JSON webhooks. Its CLI exports text, HTML, JSON, and CSV reports. SATA and USB monitoring needs no third-party tools; NVMe health logs and macOS use optional smartmontools. Raw SMART access requires administrator or sudo privileges.

SMART Sniffer monitors disk health and sends warnings to Home Assistant. A lightweight Go agent runs on each monitored machine, where every drive appears as its own Home Assistant device. Its Attention Needed sensor covers ATA, SATA, NVMe, and SAS drives, returning NO, MAYBE, YES, or UNSUPPORTED. When a drive’s health changes, persistent Home Assistant notifications can appear automatically, with options to escalate, de-escalate, or dismiss them automatically. Agents advertise on the local network through mDNS/Zeroconf, allowing Home Assistant to find them without manual IP entry. Filesystem monitoring is optional; for configured mountpoints, it reports total, used, and available bytes plus usage percentage. An integration service call can provide SMART data and assessments for use with Google AI, ChatGPT, Claude, or Ollama. The agent also exposes HTTP endpoints for health, drive summaries, individual SMART data, and filesystem usage. SMART Sniffer is free and MIT-licensed. It requires smartmontools 7.0 or newer for JSON output; some USB enclosures that block SMART passthrough are reported as unsupported with unknown health.