Argus Disk vs Western Digital Kitfox
Argus Disk
github.comWestern Digital Kitfox
support-en.wd.comSide by side
| Figure | Argus Disk | Western Digital Kitfox |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | — |
| Free plan | Yes | — |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | — |
| Self-hosted | Yes | — |
| Plans published | 1 | 0 |
| Spec score · Disk Health Monitoring Software | 7.9 (#12) | 6.7 (#28) |
| Intended users | The maker describes Argus as a monitor for Linux homelab systems and recommends Debian 12 or Ubuntu 22.04 or later. | The listed supported drives and features describe Kitfox as a utility for Windows users checking and managing compatible WD drives. |
| Purpose | Argus is a SMART monitoring daemon for Linux homelab systems that analyzes disk trends for early warning of failures. | Western Digital Kitfox assists with WD drive testing, temperature monitoring, and health checks. |
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.
Western Digital Kitfox
Western Digital Kitfox has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.