You know, there are external drive USB controllers that linux blocks/blacklists SMART passthrough when using UAS due to paranoia and historical problems, but th

You know, there are external drive USB controllers that linux blocks/blacklists SMART passthrough when using UAS due to paranoia and historical problems, but this can overridden. https://www.mcgarrah.org/usb-drive-smart/ https://www.mcgarrah.org/usb-drive-smart/ I guess it is possible this is not your problem, but the last Seagate external I bought in October worked just fine with this workaround. This is probably safe from a data integrity standpoint, at least with a modern filesystem, but in my case it was no issue as I was only using the SMART to do tests before shucking the drive. Also, I don't know of any modern drive that truly doesn't support SMART.