Argus Disk vs GSmartControl
Argus Disk
github.comGSmartControl
gsmartcontrol.shaduri.devSide by side
| Figure | Argus Disk | GSmartControl |
|---|---|---|
| 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) | 8.4 (#4) |
| License | Argus is distributed under the MIT License, which permits use, modification, and distribution subject to its terms. | GSmartControl is licensed under GNU General Public License version 3. |
| Purpose | Argus is a SMART monitoring daemon for Linux homelab systems that analyzes disk trends for early warning of failures. | GSmartControl is a graphical interface for smartctl that lets users inspect SMART data and run drive tests. |
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.
GSmartControl
GSmartControl is a graphical interface for smartctl, used to inspect drive SMART data and run tests. It displays drive identity, capabilities, attributes and device statistics, and automatically highlights anomalies. Users can enable or disable SMART and adjust global or per-drive smartctl options. Saved smartctl output can be opened as a read-only virtual device. The software supports ATA drives, including SATA and PATA, and NVMe drives, plus some devices behind USB bridges and selected RAID controllers. SCSI and SAS drives are not supported, though some information about them may appear. GSmartControl is free software under the GNU General Public License version 3. Downloads include Linux packages, Windows installers and portable archives, FreeBSD ports, macOS packages and source code. smartmontools is a runtime requirement, but official Windows packages include the required software. Useful operations require root or Administrator privileges because operating systems restrict direct hardware access. Supported systems listed include Linux, Windows, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, DragonFlyBSD, macOS and Solaris; QNX support is described as untested.