DiskMaster vs HDD Health Monitor

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.

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.