Formatting New External Drive Taking A While

Tech Support
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1

I’m struggling with formatting my Western Digital MyBook 4TB 2.5" portable drive. I decided to go from a large 3.5" drive (2tb) to this as the smaller form factor and not having to plug it in to a power outlet was appealing. Right now it’s formatting and doing partitioning. I’ll let it run overnight to see if it works.

According to this blog post, might have not been the best idea Choosing a backup drive | Carbon Copy Cloner | Bombich Software. Not using an SSD, it’s being used for a clone of my HD, my photos, Archive, and iTunes backup. Going to put the old drive into my Unraid system I’ve started. Thoughts as to why it seems to take a while to format? Formatting in APFS, previous had my external drive (3.5 inch drive) formatted in Mac Journaled.

2

There was another discussion here recently that said APFS was OK for HDDs, but my experience was not good. The same discussion also included mention that Disk Utility is a bit of a mess these days.

I had to fight it to remove an APFS partition on a small WDD 4TB HDD just last week.

3

Thanks for the info, what did you format it as instead?

4

Good old HFS+ (Mac OS Extended journaled).