How do I get Disk Utility to read SMART data from USB drives?

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

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

See here. 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