SMART Sniffer vs SMART Utility
SMART Sniffer
github.comSMART Utility
volitans-software.comSide by side
| Figure | SMART Sniffer | SMART Utility |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | — |
| Free plan | Yes | — |
| Free trial | — | Yes |
| Open source | Yes | — |
| Web | Yes | — |
| Windows | Yes | — |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | — |
| API | Yes | — |
| Self-hosted | Yes | — |
| Plans published | 2 | 5 |
| Spec score · Disk Health Monitoring Software | 8.3 (#5) | 7.4 (#23) |
| Notifications | Persistent Home Assistant notifications are generated automatically when drive health changes, with escalation and automatic dismissal after recovery. | It supports Growl notifications when installed and email notifications when configured. |
| Purpose | SMART Sniffer monitors disk health and reports early warning signs to Home Assistant. | SMART Utility reads and displays hard drive SMART attributes and can run a drive’s built-in self-test. |
Plans
SMART Utility
- Personal license$25, paid once
- Family license$40, paid once
- Educational site license$65, paid once
- Business license$100, paid once
- Consultant license$350, 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.
SMART Utility
SMART Utility has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.