An external USB drive enclosure that supports S.M.A.R.T.
Today, my gift to you: After extensive research and testing, I have found a 3.5” SATA⇒USB enclosure that will work with smartmontools to allow you to monitor the S.M.A.R.T. data of your drive. This one may be unique in that I have an actual link you can click and buy the enclosure!
You can get them from Amazon for \$30: Amazon.com: Sabrent eSATA to Serial ATA (SATA) and IDE(PATA) USB 2.0 3.5-Inch Aluminum Hard Drive Enclosure Case
Ugly Caveat: There are at least two different designs sold under the same model number. Some, possibly older ones though 2 of the 3 I got from Amazon today are this variant, have silver screws and absolutely awful power adapters with white labels. The part where the 120v cord enters is badly made and the cord will not make contact or make intermittent contact unless you cram it in very hard. The variant with black screws has a different model of power supply and seems to be ok. The box art work matches the unit inside. Both variants have the JMicron JM20337 chipset so all is good.
I’ve got a Western Digital Green 1TB (older model, 512 byte sectors)
running in there and smartctl -d usbjmicron -a /dev/sdg is working
perfectly on my Linux box.
(smartmontools 5.38 from Debian Lenny was not new enough. I think 5.39 would be, but I jumped straight to the dev edge.)
I couldn’t get S.M.A.R.T. to work with this drive on Mac OS X, same version of smartmontools, but it doesn’t want to talk to the drive.