USB SMART pass-through external enclosures!

Looking at external enclosures for 3.5″ HDs I found this in the comments for for the Antec MX-100 Aluminum 3.5″ Black USB 2.0 External Enclosure

on NewEgg.com

Pros: [Editing my previous review] This enclosure has the Sunplus SPIF225A-HL231 chip which does support SMART pass-through. Had to use experimental support found in the more recent CVS builds of smartmontools. Other than that, solid build, nice finish. Got a cool drive so I can’t really say much about temps. I’m happy.

I am very pleased to learn that the ability to poll SMART data via on externally attached HDs is emerging.  One of my bigger concerns with migrating data to externals is not being able to poll SMART status codes.  The next puzzle is if eSATA supports SMART data polling.  My instincts say that this probably works by default but I haven’t yet made the leap forward into SATA.