DiskMaster vs smartmontools

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.

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.