How long does an ext4 format take?

Question

The USB cable on my Iomega Prestige 1TB hard drive conked out a while back, and I've finally managed to get a new one. I removed the old NTFS file system because I use Windows maybe once a month, and then only for Windows-only activities.
So I plug in the HDD to my laptop, and get it to start converting to ext4. Gparted is currently on the "create new ext4 file system" and has been for about 2 hours.
Is this right? I know 1TB is fairly large, but the last time I did this, I'm pretty sure it was a fast(er) job.
Can anybody shed some light on what's going on here?

Solution

It shouldn't take that long. Try sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdX to get a better idea of where it gets hung up. The cable or the disk (more likely) is going bad.

Comments

[One Zero]

thats too much time

[John S Gruber]

I doubt that it is writing more than a few thousand records to the drive. To check the disk drive's health S.M.A.R.T may help. See askubuntu.com/questions/147709/… . Formatting a 30GB partition with a directly connected HDD takes just a few seconds for me.