Trying to format the Seagate Backup Plus 4TB I just bought through Disc Management and it's been over seven hours with only 8% having advanced so far. The task manager shows the write speed as 12mb/s and I'm using a USB2 port. What can I possibly do at this point to minimize the chances of drive failure in case I want to stop the formatting process? The average time it took to complete on my other older 4TB Seagate drive was roughly the same time (seven hours), but this is excruciatingly slow, and I have no idea why that is. Any suggestions?

Thanks in advance.

The fastest transfer rate via USB 2.0 is about 30MB/s. Typical speeds are more like 20MB/s. Your other drive was probably formatted via USB 3.0.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

According to google math

(4 TB) / (12 (MB / second)) =
3.85802469 days

You want to speed it up, connect to USB 3 which is technically 10 times faster than USB 2.

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Luke
Recovery Force Data Recovery

So, if I were to use the offline option in Disk Management right now would it be problematic, say in terms of possibilities of drive malfunction?

Formatting means to logically define the physical space on the drive.
What gives the impression that the drive will sustain a failure/malfunction if you stop the formatting process?

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Hard Disk Drive (HDD), Solid State Drive (SSD, SATA, NVMe, etc), USB Flash Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts