Is doing a secure 3-pass erase and reformat of a 1tb drive. This has taken 15 hours so far.

boring!

If I were doing that, I would be staring at the screen the entire time. So, yes, I am a psycho, but a kindly psycho.

At least you can still use the computer during the process.

Three pass? I mean if it's a full format where everything is rewritten, then it's ok.

If you are not a secret agent or a terrorist, there's is nothing so important there that could justify a pretty expensive and hard to to scan of the drives to find some 'side-magnetism' to find traces of the old data.

Tillie : it is a full reformat. It has been over 30 hours and it is still running. Albeit on its third pass. There was an option for 6 passes.

You cannot choose just 1 pass?

I think there is something wrong with the drive. If the reformat dies, time to replace it.