Argus Disk vs HDD Health Monitor
Argus Disk
github.comHDD Health Monitor
hddmonitor.github.ioSide by side
| Figure | Argus Disk | HDD Health Monitor |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | — |
| Self-hosted | Yes | — |
| Plans published | 1 | 1 |
| Spec score · Disk Health Monitoring Software | 7.9 (#12) | 7.6 (#17) |
| Purpose | Argus is a SMART monitoring daemon for Linux homelab systems that analyzes disk trends for early warning of failures. | Reads raw S.M.A.R.T. data from physical drives and presents drive health information, warnings, and historical trends. |
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.
HDD Health Monitor
HDD Health Monitor is a free, open-source Windows utility that reads raw S.M.A.R.T. information from physical drives. It shows per-drive health and estimated performance percentages alongside a complete S.M.A.R.T. attribute table. The program scans drives automatically, monitors multiple drives at once, and gives each one its own tray icon and alerts. Notifications can cover temperature, declining health, predictive failure, reallocated sectors, uncorrectable errors, and NVMe critical warnings. While running, it records health and selected attribute snapshots every five seconds and keeps history on disk between sessions. Supported drive types include ATA/SATA, M.2 SATA, NVMe, USB, and SCSI, although available data depends on the drive and controller. USB drives appear shortly after connection and disappear from the selector when unplugged. The standalone executable needs no installer or dependencies, but administrator privileges are required. It supports Windows Vista through Windows 11 and can save a PNG screenshot. The MIT-licensed software costs nothing.