HDDlife vs smartmontools
HDDlife
hddlife.comsmartmontools
smartmontools.orgSide by side
| Figure | HDDlife | smartmontools |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | — | Free |
| Free plan | — | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | — | Yes |
| Linux | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 8 | 1 |
| Spec score · Disk Health Monitoring Software | 8.5 (#3) | 8.0 (#10) |
| Failure warnings | It warns users when S.M.A.R.T. data indicates a developing drive problem so they can back up or replace the disk. | The utilities can provide advanced warning of disk degradation and failure. |
| Purpose | HDDlife monitors hard disk and SSD health around the clock and warns about potential problems. | Smartmontools provides utilities to control and monitor storage systems using S.M.A.R.T. |
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
smartmontools
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.