Only if the interface exposes it. USB ones in my experience outright don't support it or mess it up somewhere in the chain; the only place I got SMART reliably to work was with a direct SATA attachment to a controller.
If you have a desktop PC and want to make the process of connecting external drives to SATA for this purpose a bit easier, you can add an eSATAp bracket to your PC.
Comments
You can read the temperature from SMART interface.
Only if the interface exposes it. USB ones in my experience outright don't support it or mess it up somewhere in the chain; the only place I got SMART reliably to work was with a direct SATA attachment to a controller.
If you have a desktop PC and want to make the process of connecting external drives to SATA for this purpose a bit easier, you can add an eSATAp bracket to your PC.