Honestly not sure, I started it overnight or in the morning and left it going. Between 5-15 hours I presume but definitely not typical. I then was able to create the partitions in a couple minutes no issue and have Carbon Copy Cloner cloning to it now.
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I would just like to state that if it were my drive and it took more than a minute or two - I would be worried about it.
Maybe some others can add their helpful perspectives on this issue?
Yeah, I’d be worried about a drive that took more than a few minutes to reformat (assuming I didn’t do any kind of secure erase). It could have a lot of bad blocks on it that needed to be dealt with, and that could be a bad sign.
It could also be a bad cable (if you’re lucky).
Before using it, I would run some kind of software (TechTool Pro) to do further analysis, but that’s because I already own that software.
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In the Good Old Days™ I would have had the same distrust of a slow-to-format drive, but lately I’ve had so much janky behaviour from Disk Utility that it will be my first suspicion. It can’t even manage to keep the sidebar list of partitions and devices up to date on account of its own operations. 
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