Argus Disk vs smartmontools

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.

smartmontools is a free package containing smartctl and smartd for controlling and monitoring storage devices through SMART. It supports ATA/SATA, SCSI/SAS, and NVMe disks, as well as SCSI/SAS tape devices. smartctl can report SMART health status, show capabilities such as error logging and offline surface scanning, display vendor-specific attributes, start device self-tests, and read their logs. A failing health status can mean a device has failed or predicts failure within 24 hours. smartd periodically monitors SMART status, error and self-test logs, and attribute changes; it can schedule tests and report errors and attribute changes to syslog. It also supports warning emails and executable commands. The project says it should run on modern Linux, BSD variants, macOS, Solaris, Windows, Cygwin, OS/2, eComStation, and QNX systems, and can run from various Live CDs and DVDs. The package uses the GNU GPL Version 2 license and was originally derived from the Linux smartsuite package. Its capabilities focus on SMART health reporting, testing, and ongoing monitoring.