While we're here, are there any eHDD standards (and devices) that allow you to plainly read the SATA data from the drive, merely acting as a transport for the SATA connector itself? A fair number of them don't allow you to read SMART, for instance (I think this is terrible for a good number of reasons, but alas...)

From what I understand, many eHDDs don't actually do this, instead reading the contents of the drive and exposing them to the computer by essentially emulating a USB flash drive. I would have to sniff the packets to be sure, but this is what I suspect my eHDD caddy is doing.

My main reason for wanting this is that, in some cases, it would make reading random drives substantially easier -- I have amassed a collection of HDDs that all have different partition schemes, filesystems, etc., and a fair number of those are unable to be processed by my caddy. This is a very frustrating experience, as a Linux device has some of the best filesystem / partitioning support in the world (and a random £15 caddy is obviously not going to provide very good competition.)

On the contrary, having the kernel process the HDD as a block device would most likely place it under marginally more computational stress (as opposed to the drive reading partition tables and filesystems itself), but I believe that's been fairly well-optimized by now.