I never had a problem balancing and seeing it complete within 48 hours until this week. Now I have had the server on for 5 days or so without the balancing completing. 
Status would certainly give me peace of mind, especially since I heard of the file corruption bug and I had used Vista to rotate pictures from Explorer 
My idea - have a disk status with balancing info, disk process thread checks, maybe even status of bad sectors and S.M.A.R.T. on the drive array. This may be possible with a small plug-in 
The Kitty