DiskMaster vs GSmartControl

DiskMaster is a free desktop application for monitoring drive health on Windows, Linux, and macOS. It reads SMART attributes, self-tests, and test logs, then calculates a health score out of 100 and shows which attributes account for deductions; performance has a separate score. It stores readings in SQLite and charts changes, with alerts for shifts such as increasing drive counters. A read-only surface scan times blocks, rereads unreadable sectors for confirmation, and maps them to sectors. DiskMaster can identify files associated with those sectors and try to rescue copies while skipping unreadable bytes. Optional repair tools include sector and filesystem repair, zero-fill, and sanitizing bad sectors the filesystem marks as free. Alerts can go to Slack, Discord, ntfy, email, desktop notifications, commands, or JSON webhooks. Its CLI exports text, HTML, JSON, and CSV reports. SATA and USB monitoring needs no third-party tools; NVMe health logs and macOS use optional smartmontools. Raw SMART access requires administrator or sudo privileges.

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.