HDD Health Monitor vs smartmontools

HDD Health Monitor is a free, open-source Windows utility that reads raw S.M.A.R.T. information from physical drives. It shows per-drive health and estimated performance percentages alongside a complete S.M.A.R.T. attribute table. The program scans drives automatically, monitors multiple drives at once, and gives each one its own tray icon and alerts. Notifications can cover temperature, declining health, predictive failure, reallocated sectors, uncorrectable errors, and NVMe critical warnings. While running, it records health and selected attribute snapshots every five seconds and keeps history on disk between sessions. Supported drive types include ATA/SATA, M.2 SATA, NVMe, USB, and SCSI, although available data depends on the drive and controller. USB drives appear shortly after connection and disappear from the selector when unplugged. The standalone executable needs no installer or dependencies, but administrator privileges are required. It supports Windows Vista through Windows 11 and can save a PNG screenshot. The MIT-licensed software costs nothing.

smartmontools is a free package containing smartctl and smartd for controlling and monitoring storage devices through SMART. It supports ATA/SATA, SCSI/SAS, and NVMe disks, as well as SCSI/SAS tape devices. smartctl can report SMART health status, show capabilities such as error logging and offline surface scanning, display vendor-specific attributes, start device self-tests, and read their logs. A failing health status can mean a device has failed or predicts failure within 24 hours. smartd periodically monitors SMART status, error and self-test logs, and attribute changes; it can schedule tests and report errors and attribute changes to syslog. It also supports warning emails and executable commands. The project says it should run on modern Linux, BSD variants, macOS, Solaris, Windows, Cygwin, OS/2, eComStation, and QNX systems, and can run from various Live CDs and DVDs. The package uses the GNU GPL Version 2 license and was originally derived from the Linux smartsuite package. Its capabilities focus on SMART health reporting, testing, and ongoing monitoring.