You might have success booting some Linux live image from USB. I had success with nixos 24.11 on a Mac Pro (Intel).
Thanks for the suggestion. I wiped my orphaned 2014 iMac and installed Mint on it, so I guess I should be good to go. I just didn't want to go under my desk to unplug my toaster dock and move it unless necessary.
If you have an ARM Mac and a USB enclosure for the drive, I had some success with smartmontools running in ARM Linux under VmWare. I also tried UTM (pretty much QEMU), but UTM's USB passthrough was not good enough.
Interesting. Thanks for that. I have the drive hooked up to a Mint computer running the openSeaChest utility, but that utility appears to only parse the logs. I can't find any way to extract the logs from the drive's memory. This is undocumented by the utility as far as I can tell.
I'm not 100% sure you can out of the box, the default driver on macOS is very restrictive in what commands can be passed through to the device.
Thanks for the reply. I have an old iMac running Mint, so I guess I'll start there with the openSeaChest utility.