Formatting 2tb usb disk takes forever

Troubleshooting
1

I’ve been stuck trying to format my 2tb usb external drive to use in a NAS setup samba+nextcloud.

So far I reinstalled diet pi but formatting the drives takes hours to finish sometimes fails and when it succeeds the drive is in Only read mode.

Right now I’m on my third try and the drive-manage is stuck (taking a lot of time) in the next command:
mkfs.ext4 -F -m 0 /dev/sda1

Using the drive-manager seems to be a close loop of me wasting time formatting or ending with a Only read drive.

I appreciate any experiences on what could i be doing wrong.

Setup:
Dietpi 32bits
Raspberry pi 3
Headless installation
SSH through ethernet
2tb ADATA HV300 USB drive

2

what is the read/write speed thru the USB port to the drive?

also…install and get familiar with screen which allows you to log into a terminal, then detach it and the command that was run will NOT stop.
It also allows you to re-attach at a later time

Is your external drive externally powered?

3

is not externally powered. (Probably that’s the main problem) since now I noticed the disk keeps changing to Read only mode.

I’ will measure the read/write speed tomorrow.

4

maybe there are issues on the device itself. usually a first indication is changing into r/o mode as the system is trying to protect the data.