You might want to take a look at the Drive Scope Manual for a clear and concise description of where the attribute data comes from for both SATA and NVME drives and pointers on interpretation. It doesn't take long to read and is the best description I have come across and is a free download.

I just read it and found to my surprise that only the first thirteen attributes for SATA drives are "set in stone" and the rest may or may not be the same from drive to drive. There were also reminders that with SSDs whether they are SATA or NVMe interface when key attributes are exceeded the drive may switch automatically to Read Only mode. From Micromat's forums I discovered that SATA SSDs may report the same attributes but the attribute itself is inferred (my term) from other values more appropriate to SSDs.


If we knew what it was we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, would it?

— Albert Einstein