smartctl on external hdd inside ide-to-usb enclosure

I have a very old 2.5" IDE drive inside a USB enclosure that gives some buffer I/O error. I tried to use smartctl to see what SMART says about it, but I can't manage to make it work. Being root, if I just write: #> smartctl --all /dev/sde smartctl answers: /dev/sde: Unknown USB bridge [0x14cd:0x6600 (0x201)] Smartctl: please specify device type with the -d option. So I've tried every -d TYPE available in the help summary, and the best result is achieved with: #> smartctl --all -d scsi /dev/sde that outputs: Vendor: IC25N030 Product: ATMR04-0 User Capacity: 30,005,821,440 bytes [30,0 GB] Logical block size: 512 bytes scsiModePageOffset: response length too short, resp_len=4 offset=4 bd_len=0 >> Terminate command early due to bad response to IEC mode page A mandatory SMART command failed: exiting. To continue, add one or more '-T permissive' options. If I also add -T permissive the last line is replaced with: Error Counter logging not supported Device does not support Self Test logging It seems that just a few models of USB enclosures are officially supported by smartmontools. Is there something that I'm missing or simply the device implements an archaic version of SMART without any counters (and hence almost useless)?