HDDlife vs SMART Sniffer
HDDlife
hddlife.comSMART Sniffer
github.comSide by side
| Figure | HDDlife | SMART Sniffer |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | — | Free |
| Free plan | — | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | — |
| Open source | — | Yes |
| Web | — | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | — | Yes |
| Linux | — | Yes |
| API | — | Yes |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 8 | 2 |
| Spec score · Disk Health Monitoring Software | 8.5 (#3) | 8.3 (#5) |
| Purpose | HDDlife monitors hard disk and SSD health around the clock and warns about potential problems. | SMART Sniffer monitors disk health and reports early warning signs to Home Assistant. |
| USB limitation | Some USB-drive controllers do not support the S.M.A.R.T. commands required for health monitoring. | USB enclosures that block SMART passthrough are marked UNSUPPORTED with Health: Unknown. |
| What it does | HDDlife monitors hard-drive and SSD health and performance continuously in the background. | SMART Sniffer combines a Home Assistant custom integration with a Go agent that reads S.M.A.R.T. data and reports drive health. |
Plans
HDDlife
- Professional$19, paid once
- Professional$19, paid once
- Notebook$25, paid once
- Notebook$25, paid once
- Bundle$35, paid once
- Bundle$35, paid once
- Family$65, paid once
- Family$65, paid once
In their own words
SMART Sniffer
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.