Hello Linux friends

I have a 2TB Seagate STBD2000101 SATA drive in a Rosewill JBOD enclosure attached to my Gateway LT20 laptop.

When I purchased the HD, I was unaware that the APM was very aggressive, and it would spin down after about 10 minutes of being idle. The delay in access as well as the concern about drive wear prompted me to find a program that would disable the APM via S.M.A.R.T. Since I first configured the drive in Win7, I used CrystalDiskInfo and that worked to keep the drive on (as well as get rid of that annoying chirp sound).

My problem is that in Ubuntu, smartmontools tells me that the drive is not S.M.A.R.T. capable, so I am unable to change the settings. This is confusing because it IS a smart drive. Im not sure if it is because the drive is attached via USB to SATA or what. I was unable to find much help on the samrtctl manpages either.

Can anyone tell me what I can do?

Thanks in advance

GAH! I meant to put this in the hardware forums. Can an admin move this post?