This may only refer to SATA drives, I have a Maxtor UDMA drive with SMART monitoring capability. As I have more than 23 partitions, I dont use the SATA limitation of 15 partitions, and append hwprobe=-modules.pata to my grub configuration.
In this case with hda smartctl reports:

smartctl -a /dev/hda | grep Load_Cycle_Count
193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 253 253 000 Old_age Always - 0


Information for drive:

orac:/home/anc # smartctl -i /dev/hda
smartctl version 5.37 [i686-suse-linux-gnu] Copyright © 2002-6 Bruce Allen
Home page is http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Model Family: Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 family
Device Model: Maxtor 6Y160P0
Serial Number: Y44QPY5E
Firmware Version: YAR41BW0
User Capacity: 163,928,604,672 bytes
Device is: In smartctl database [for details use: -P show]
ATA Version is: 7
ATA Standard is: ATA/ATAPI-7 T13 1532D revision 0
Local Time is: Sat Nov 3 10:19:52 2007 GMT
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled