Question: When I plug in a external USB drive and want to check its S.M.A.R.T. status in Disk Utility (palimpsest) I cannot because the option is greyed out. Is there an option somewhere to enable this feature? It works fine for internal IDE/SATA drives.

I know the USB drive supports S.M.A.R.T. because I can use smartmontools and front end GSmartControl to get the information, but I'd rather not have to use use it since palimpsest is already installed by default.

Thanks

Answer: 
### You cannot. It's a known bug. They're not going to fix it anytime soon.

See [here](https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-disk-utility/+bug/743927). The bug is confirmed, set to low importance, not assigned to any developer and has no ETA for a fix.

I guess they're comfortable with people using `smartctl`/GSmartControl for SMART on USB drives...
This is a three-year old question, but for posterity I wanted to point out that the bug was apparently fixed by 2012-10-16 in Ubuntu 12.10:

<https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-disk-utility/+bug/743927/comments/6>