Christopher (Drashna)

Especially if this is not an NVMe drive, SSDs use all sorts of different values for SMART.   What is valid and okay for one drive may be out of spec on another drive. And that's not asuming that the OEM isn't using some sort of encryption/obsfuscation for the numbers.   Which is super common.  
NVMe has an actual, published standard, and is generally better about this (though, we've seen a few instances of issues with this). 

Definitely overthinking it.   Specifically, while StableBit DrivePool will rebalance data, most of the default enabled balancers handle edge cases, so there should be very little balancing that occurs, once the pool has "settled".   
There is a brief summary of these balancers here: 
https://stablebit.com/Support/DrivePool/2.X/Manual?Section=Balancing Plug-ins#Default Plug-ins
But for ease:
StableBit Scanner This plug-in is designed to work in conjunction with the StableBit Scanner version 2.2 and newer. It performs automatic file evacuation from damaged drives and temperature control. Volume Equalization This balancer is responsible to equalizing the disk space used on multiple volumes that reside on the same physical disk. it has no user configurable settings. Disk Usage Limiter This plug-in lets you designate which disks are allowed to store unduplicated vs. duplicated files. It doesn't do anything unless you change its settings to limit file placement on a disk. Prevent Drive Overfill This plug-in tries to keep an empty buffer of free space on each drive part of the pool in order to facilitate existing file expansion. Duplication Space Optimizer This plug-in examines the current data distribution on all of your pooled disks and decides if some data needs to be rebalanced in order to provide optimal disk space availability for duplicated files (see About Balancing for more information).  
The StableBit Scanner balancer may move stuff around a lot, but only if it detects issues with a drive.  And the Duplication Space Optimizer will try to rebalance the data to minimize the amount of "Unusable for duplication" space on the pool.  Aside from that, none of these should move data around much, normally. 

That's a plus!
That said, I know it doesn't help now, but there are a couple of posts on the forum here that cover how to index/catalog your files.  It may be worth checking those out.
Also, if it's TV shows/movies/etc, there are software that can help make inventorying them easier. 

I'm sorry to hear about the drive failure!
And yeah, any drives that were only on the drive that failed would no longer show up in the pool. 

Getting the correct power state of the disk is a little tricky. There are really 2 separate mechanisms that control whether a disk has spun down or not, the OS and the disk's firmware.
 
Here are the tricky parts:
The disk's firmware can spin a drive down at any time without the OS's knowledge. But this is typically disabled on new drives. This behavior can be modified under Disk Control in the StableBit Scanner. In order to get the actual power state of the drive we can query it directly, instead of asking Windows. The problem here is that, to Windows, this appears as disk access and it will prevent the OS from ever spinning down the drive. What the StableBit Scanner does by default is it always asks the OS and it never queries the drive directly. This ensures that the OS will spin the drive down correctly. even though we're querying it for the power state. But the issue here is that just because the OS thinks that the drive is active doesn't mean that it's actually spun up. If the disk's firmware has spun down the drive, the OS has no way to know that. The StableBit Scanner deals with this by reporting in the UI that the drive is Standby or Active. Since we can't attempt to query the drive directly without your explicit permission (this will upset Windows' power management), this is the best answer we can give you.
 
The Query power mode directly from disk option, which is found in Disk Settings, is there to work around this shortcoming. When enabled, the StableBit Scanner will attempt to query the power mode directly from the disk. Keep in mind that this can fail if it can't establish Direct I/O to the disk, in which case we fall beck to relying on the OS.
 
The way it works is like this:
Query the OS. If the disk has spun down then this must be the case. The disk is in Standby. If the disk is Active (spun up) then we can't trust the OS because the disk firmware could have spun it down. If the user has not explicitly allowed us to query the power mode from the disk, we must assume Standby or Active. If the user has allowed us to query the power mode from the disk, query the power mode. If the query succeeds, set the mode to Active or to Standby (not both, because we know the power state for sure). If the query fails, fall back to the OS and set the mode to Standby or Active. So when should you enable Query power mode directly from disk?
 
When you don't want to use the OS's power management features to spin the disk down. Why would you do this?
 
Pros:
You can control the spin down on a per disk basis. You get exact disk power states being reported in the StableBit Scanner with no ambiguity. Avoid disk spin up issues when querying SMART (I will explain below). Cons:
Requires Direct I/O to the disk. To the OS (and to any other program that queries the OS) the disk will appear to be always spun up. When the OS spins down a disk it flushes the file system cache prior to spinning it down. This ensures that the disk is not spun up very quickly after that because it needs to write some additional data to it from the cache. When the firmware spins a disk down, this does not happen and there is a chance that the disk will be spun up very quickly after that to perform another write. From my experience, this is not common in practice. What about S.M.A.R.T. queries?
 
In the StableBit Scanner, by default, SMART is queried from WMI first. If Direct I/O is not available then all the SMART data has to come from WMI. Typically this would not spin up a disk.
 
If Direct I/O is possible to the disk then at least some additional SMART data will come from Direct I/O (and if WMI doesn't have the SMART data then all of the SMART data comes from Direct I/O). One potential problem here is that Windows considers any communication with the disk, disk activity. So if you're communicating with the disk to retrieve SMART every couple of minutes then Windows will not spin the disk down.
 
You can avoid this problem in 2 ways:
Don't let Windows control your disk spin down and set up a Standby timer in Disk Control (this has the pros and cons as outlined above). Set Throttle queries in Settings -> Scanner Settings -> SMART -> Throttle queries. Set the throttle minutes to something higher than the Windows disk spin down time (which can be examined in Power Options under the Windows Control Panel). The option Only query during the work window or if scanning controls SMART queries and has no effect on power queries. Again, by default power queries do not spin up a disk unless you've manually enabled Query power mode directly from disk (in which case you are effectively saying that you don't want the OS to ever spin down a disk).

You also opened a ticket for this. 
But to repeat what I said there, and echo what vapechiK said, 
This is perfectly normal, and expected.  In all cases, here. 
the pool drive itself is fully virtual, but doesn't have any blocks/data on the drive. All of the data is "reverse proxied" to the underlying disks, and handled invisible.  So CHKDSK won't work on the drive, and it does not appear in StableBit Scanner.   And the size is normal, as Windows needs a size before that can be properly read, so the 2TB size is a placeholder. 

Reparse point information is stored in the .covefs folder in the root of the pool.  Worst case, delete the link, remove the contents of the .covefs folder, and then reboot. 

Reparse point information is stored in the .covefs folder in the root of the pool.  Worst case, delete the link, remove the contents of the .covefs folder, and then reboot. 

It contains internal data for the drive.  Primarily, information about reparse points on the pool (junctions, symlinks, etc).  
If you have none of this (you can check by opening the folder), then it should be okay.  But if you do, then messing with the folder can/will break the reparse points.

No worries!  Sometimes, internet stuff .... 
But glad that we got it sorted.

Thanks for answering @shane.  Turns out I had a disk that was failing and needed to pull it from the pool and replace it.  Support helped me through the process and the software worked exactly as it should have.  Victory!
 

It will see the drives as non-pooled drives.  So you should be fine, in that regards. 
 

You may need to reset the settings:
http://wiki.covecube.com/StableBit_DrivePool_Q2299585B
http://wiki.covecube.com/StableBit_Scanner_Q4200749

To get this started apparently:
 
My server was kind of piecemeal constructed.
 
 
I recently purchased a 42U HP Rack from a local company (via Craigslist), for super cheap ($50, so literally couldn't pass it up)
 
Sophos UTM (Home): 
Case: Antec ISK 110 VESA case,
Mobo (SoC): ASRock RACK J1900D2Y
RAM: 4GB of non-ECC RAM
OS Drive: Samsung 850 Pro 120GB SSD 
 
 
Storage Server:
Case: SuperMicro 847E26-R1K28LPB
OS: Windows Server 2012R2 Essentials
CPU: AMD FX-8120  Intel Xeon E3 1245v3 (link)
MoBo: ASRock 990FX Extreme3  Supermicro MBD-X10SAT-O (link)
RAM: 2x8GB Crucial ECC
GFX: nVidia geForce 9400  Intel HD 4600 (on processor GFX)
PSU: Built in, 2x redundant power supplies (1280W 80+ Gold) 
OS Drive: Crucial MX200 256GB SSD
Storage Pool: 146TB:  4x 4TB (Seagate NAS ST4000VN000) + 8x 4TB (WD40EFRX) + 12x 8TB Seagate Archive (ST8000AS0002), 2x 8TB Seagate  Barracudas (ST8000DM004), 2x 128GB OCZ Vertex 4s
Misc Storage: 500GB, used for temp files (downloads)
HDD Controller card: IBM ServeRAID M1015, cross flashed to "IR Mode" (RAID options, used to pass through disks only), plus an Intel SAS Expander card 
USB: 2TB Seagate Backup Plus for Server Backup (system drive, and system files) using a WD Green EARS 
 
 
NVR (Network Video Record, aka IP camera box) via BlueIris:
Case: Norco ITX-S4 
OS: Windows 10
CPU: Intel Core i3-4130T
MoBo: ASRock Rack E3C226D2I 
RAM: 2x8GB G.Skill 
GFX: ASPEED 2300
PSU: 450W 1U 
OS Drive: 128GB SSD, Crucial M550
Storage Pool: 2x4TB Toshiba HDD
 
HyperV VM Lab:
Case: Supermicro SYS-6016T-NTF (1U case) 
OS: HyperV Server 2012R2
CPU: Intel Xeon 5560  (x2, hyperthreading disabled)
MoBo: Supermicro X8DTU 
RAM: 64GBs (8x8GB) Hynix Registered ECC (DDR3-1333)
GFX: ASPEED 2300
PSU: 560W 1U 
OS Drive: 160GB HDD 
Storage: 500GB Crucial MX200 SSD, using Data Deduplication for VMs
 
 
Emby Server: 
Case: Unknown (1U case) 
OS: Windows 10 Pro x64
CPU: Dual Intel Xeon x5660's (hardware fairy swung by)
MoBo: Supermicro X8DTi 
RAM: 20GB (5x4GB) Samsung Registered ECC
GFX: Matrox (Onboard)
PSU: 560W 1U 
OS Drive: 64GB SSD,
Storage: 128GB  (cache, metadata, transcoding temp) 
 
 
Netgear GS724T Smart Switch
24 port, Gigabit, Managed Switch (one port is burned out already, but it was used). 
 
 
Dell 17" keyboard and monitor tray (used, damaged, propped up). 
 
Images here: http://imgur.com/a/WRhZf
 
 

Here is my network hardware.  Not a great image, but that's the 24 port, managed switch, a punchout block, waaay too long cables, cable modem and Sophos UTM box.
 

Misc drawers and unused spares. 
 

 
And my servers. HyperV system in the 1U, and my storage server in the 4U. And the Cyberpower UPS at the bottom. 
 
What you don't see is the NVR box, as it's been having issues, and I've been troubleshooting those issues. 

Regardless of the quality of the software, this isn't helpful nor constructive, and provides nothing to the conversation. 
 

If you're using duplication, then definitely, as each copy of duplicated files are written in parallel.  Having multiple SSDs (and using the SSD Optimizer balancer) will get better write speeds, as it is much less likely to have to use a spinning drive for writing. 
 

https://stablebit.com/DrivePool/Download
Once you click the checkbox, there is a "what's new?" link that will take you to here:
https://stablebit.com/DrivePool/ChangeLog?Platform=win
Or you can see the beta changelog here:
https://dl.covecube.com/DrivePoolWindows/beta/download/changes.txt

There are some hidden by default, already, but that's because they're experimental. 
But I don't see a reason why this couldn't be added. 
StableBit Scanner uses Telerik controls, which we stopped supporting/using, since they come with a bunch of their own issues.  
StableBit DrivePool and StableBit CloudDrive use entirely custom implementations, and all native WPF controls, because of some of the issues we've had with telerik controls. 
So, pretty much the opposite.  Eg, StableBit Scanner is the older product (the first, actually). 

To clarify, StableBit DrivePool doesn't use the drive letters or mount points.  It uses the volume ID for the disks.  So you can change how the drive is mounted without any issues. 
Personally, I prefer mounting the drives to folder paths, as that hides them, but still allows them to be accessible. 

For balancing and duplication operations, the files are copied to a temp folder, and then renamed when the operation completes.  this ensures that even if an interruption occurs, that the files are intact, whole and not corrupted.   
And yeah, that's probably a good way to set things up. 

correct, internal operations (balancing, duplication, measuring) are not reported there. Only activity it reports is what happens through the pool drive. 

The 100gb has been there for a long while, TBH.  And that's been the default for it since the start.  And by a long while, I mean since the DrivePool v1 days> (so ~2011).   Eg, back when drives rating in TBs were at the high end, for the most part. 
You and disable the option or set it to something more reasonable for your setup.   But it sounds like unchecking it may be what you want here. 

It should be simpler, yes. 

Nope.  
The surface scan is a sector by sector scan. 
The file system scan is an api call for CHKDSK. 
So unless you're using the file recovery option, it should not be reading files. 

Mostly, this. 
You can use utilities like WinDirStat to view the drives.   But it's very possible/likely that you won't find anything specifically.   Most likely, the difference is due to the size vs size on disk differences (slack space), as well as the System Volume Information folder on each disk.