Argus Disk vs SMART Utility
Argus Disk
github.comSMART Utility
volitans-software.comSide by side
| Figure | Argus Disk | SMART Utility |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | — |
| Free plan | Yes | — |
| Free trial | — | Yes |
| Open source | — | — |
| macOS | — | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | — |
| Self-hosted | Yes | — |
| Plans published | 1 | 5 |
| Spec score · Disk Health Monitoring Software | 7.9 (#12) | 7.4 (#23) |
| Notifications | An optional ntfy integration sends status-change alerts with priority routing. | It supports Growl notifications when installed and email notifications when configured. |
| Purpose | Argus is a SMART monitoring daemon for Linux homelab systems that analyzes disk trends for early warning of failures. | SMART Utility reads and displays hard drive SMART attributes and can run a drive’s built-in self-test. |
Plans
SMART Utility
- Personal license$25, paid once
- Family license$40, paid once
- Educational site license$65, paid once
- Business license$100, paid once
- Consultant license$350, paid once
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.
SMART Utility
SMART Utility has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.