When adding an instance to HA should 'area' be the same for all of them?

[wkearney99]

What would you like?
Adding a smartha-sniffer daemon for a host with multiple drives requires manually populating each one's "area" in HA

I don't know how readily HA allows for sharing the "area" when using a card like this to create the devices.

Why?
Avoid tedium of populating the area, and potentially make mistakes. I've got a NAS with 6 drives (2 SSD, 4 spinning rust) and that requires setting the same area eight times. I mean, I guess you could have drives in a separate enclosure but it seems unlikely they'd be in a separate "area" within HA.

Alternatives considered

Additional context
I don't know what complications might also exist if it was desirable to be able to "move" a device to a different "area" within HA.

[DAB-LABS]

The Agency has taken note, Agent wkearney99 ~ this is a legitimate UX papercut and we have a plan. 😎

Right now (works in any HA version): you can bulk-assign in the Devices UI without setting eight times. Settings → Devices & Services → click the SMART Sniffer tile → check the boxes next to all the drives → "Move to area" in the action bar. Two clicks per group instead of eight individual edits. Same flow if you ever need to move them later ~ select, move.

Coming in a near release: we're going to link drive devices to their parent agent device via HA's via_device mechanism. Once that ships, your six drives will nest under the agent device in the Devices UI, and HA will offer "apply this area to all children" as a single action when you set the agent's area. That gets you down to one click for the whole NAS.

Roadmap entry tracking this: Integration: parent-agent device hierarchy + optional area-on-setup. The "optional area-on-setup" piece is still being scoped ~ there's a real design question about whether to ask in the config flow (one less click, but the user can't see their drives yet) or in the OPTIONS flow (one more click, but more informed). We'll work that out before we ship.

Thanks for filing it ~ second sharp report in two issues. 🕵️‍♂️

Good fieldwork, Agent. 👏

~DAB