Yes aware of that but looking at it from an XY perspective it looks like the thing escalated from the approach. Regarding USB / TB external disks, they do supp

Yes aware of that but looking at it from an XY perspective it looks like the thing escalated from the approach. Regarding USB / TB external disks, they do support SMART but only if the controller does forward the info to the Mac. The Mac doesn't give a shit about what's on the other side of the controller. This is where you get some reporting and some not. DriveDx is being used to circumvent that issue by I assume intercepting the commands and forwarding them to the drive. And of course at this point you have to break the secure boot chain by loading kexts that can intercept the disk traffic. Now worthy of mentioning here, brew installed smartmontools does report SMART status fully on my 970 EVO in the cheapest USB-C enclosure on amazon. It doesn't report it in disk utility but does on the terminal. YMMV but the problem here may be using the wrong analysis tool or the wrong migration approach. The disk health and integrity doesn't ensure the data integrity either as it may fail after the health is checked so the validation should be done at a higher level (sha256 the whole migration before and after etc)