smartmontools vs SSD Fan Control
smartmontools
smartmontools.orgSSD Fan Control
exirion.netSide by side
| Figure | smartmontools | SSD Fan Control |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Windows | Yes | — |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | — |
| Plans published | 1 | 2 |
| Spec score · Hardware monitoring tools | 8.7 (#9) | 7.5 (#47) |
| Spec score · Hardware Monitoring Software | 7.9 (#30) | 7.1 (#57) |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Purpose | Smartmontools provides utilities to control and monitor storage systems using S.M.A.R.T. | SSD Fan Control addresses noisy hard disk fans in iMacs using third-party hard disks or solid state disks. |
| Supported platforms | Darwin (Mac OS X),Linux,FreeBSD,NetBSD,OpenBSD,Solaris,OS/2,Cygwin,QNX,eComStation,Windows | macOS |
Plans
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.
SSD Fan Control
SSD Fan Control has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.