Argus Disk vs DiskMaster
Argus Disk
github.comDiskMaster
github.comSide by side
| Figure | Argus Disk | DiskMaster |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| macOS | — | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | — |
| Plans published | 1 | 1 |
| Spec score · Disk Health Monitoring Software | 7.9 (#12) | 8.0 (#8) |
| Purpose | Argus is a SMART monitoring daemon for Linux homelab systems that analyzes disk trends for early warning of failures. | DiskMaster monitors drive health on Windows, Linux and macOS. |
Plans
In their own words
Argus Disk
Argus Disk is a Linux SMART monitoring daemon for homelab systems. It gathers drive attributes every six hours and keeps a rolling 180-day history; linear regression uses that record to estimate when an attribute may reach its critical threshold. The maker says its thresholds are calibrated with Backblaze failure data rather than vendor defaults. Temperature anomaly detection uses z-scores, requiring a score of at least 2.0 over 10 or more samples. Optional ntfy integration can send status-change alerts with priority routing. An optional Prometheus exporter makes disk health, status, temperature, sector counts, forecasts, and overall status available to dashboards such as Grafana. Argus supports JMicron JMB576 pass-through for multi-bay DAS enclosures, including TerraMaster D5-300 and similar devices. The maker says it runs on the user's hardware, without cloud use, and keeps data within the user's network. It requires a Linux host, Python 3.10 or later, and smartmontools; ntfy and Prometheus with Grafana are optional. Argus is free and distributed under the MIT License.
DiskMaster
DiskMaster is a free desktop application for monitoring drive health on Windows, Linux, and macOS. It reads SMART attributes, self-tests, and test logs, then calculates a health score out of 100 and shows which attributes account for deductions; performance has a separate score. It stores readings in SQLite and charts changes, with alerts for shifts such as increasing drive counters. A read-only surface scan times blocks, rereads unreadable sectors for confirmation, and maps them to sectors. DiskMaster can identify files associated with those sectors and try to rescue copies while skipping unreadable bytes. Optional repair tools include sector and filesystem repair, zero-fill, and sanitizing bad sectors the filesystem marks as free. Alerts can go to Slack, Discord, ntfy, email, desktop notifications, commands, or JSON webhooks. Its CLI exports text, HTML, JSON, and CSV reports. SATA and USB monitoring needs no third-party tools; NVMe health logs and macOS use optional smartmontools. Raw SMART access requires administrator or sudo privileges.