It sounds like they're doing something similar to Seagate's Field Access Reliability Metrics (FARM) log where IIRC it's much harder to reset or forge their wear-leveling/usage stats, vs SMART metrics which certain manufacturers seem to clear when drives are re-certified[0]. I've seen this tool[1] mentioned often in /r/DataHoarder discussions about checking whether second hand drives have had this stat-reset done. I'm assuming it compares `smartctl --log=farm` output with the attribute/device-statistic log counter values.
A friend and I have been building our own solution[2] for monitoring these wear-leveling attributes on NVMe and SATA drives, with the focus being on tracking and visualizing trends over time. We both have a large collection of drives in various servers and laptops and found that SMART metrics can be reported somewhat inconsistently from vendor to vendor so what started as a simple shell script to scrape `smartctl` output has now turned into a lightweight desktop agent that attempts to normalize all these inconsistencies and let us focus on the actual signals while also allowing us to define alerts/notify us of anomalies via email - maybe something HN users will find useful.
Fun fact: did you know that most drives maintain a pool of spare sectors/cells that are used by the firmware to replace blocks that have failed? It's one of the many metrics we like to track and visualize in Sentinowl [2]!
[0] https://github.com/gamestailer94/farm-check/tree/main
[1] https://www.heise.de/en/news/Fraud-with-Seagate-hard-disks-D...
[2] https://sentinowl.com/