When using external NVMe devices on iOS / iPadOS I cannot tell how to access the disk SMART data. On macOS I can use NVMeSMARTLibExternal.h to access this information but the same system does not seem to work on iPadOS (even with Thunderbolt NVMe devices). When using M series iPads with professional Thunderbolt storage this woudlbe very useful.

Is there an API that allows mounting a volume, just like DADiskMount(), but that also accepts a password or automatically requests keychain access for encrypted volumes? Could be APFS or CoreStorage volumes. How do you mount those programmatically?

There seems to be at least 3 possible APIs to detect the mounting of a volume on macOS: Endpoint Security APIs through the NOTIFY_MOUNT event. Disk Arbitration NSWorkspace notifications. If we omit NSWorkspace for different reasons (headless, background context), this leaves only 2 choices. From what I'm reading and understanding, the NOTIFY_MOUNT event is just telling that a volume is being mounted. It does not guarantee that the volume is mounted at the time of the event. So this seems to leave only Disk Arbitration. Since the Disk Arbitration API has been there for a long time, the question is: Is there a more modern API than Disk Arbitration to know when a volume has been mounted?