In a former life I developed, installed, and supported document imaging systems for county government, mostly for land records. This was a very storage-intensive application compared to traditional data processing. We sold an HP optical jukebox, a device that stored 20 optical disks and housed a couple of drives. The disks were like high capacity CDs but each was housed in a plastic case. They were like oversized diskettes, if you remember those. The unit had robotics that loaded the appropriate optical disk into one of the drives on demand. Needless to say, the whole process was slow. When an end user called up an image that had been archived to optical, it might take 45 seconds or more to display.

We sold these 20 gigabyte jukeboxes for about $24,000 iirc. Digital storage has come a long way in the past 30 years.

 

Mike, I initiated AdBlock again but I am seeing ads at the top of this page and at the bottom. Do you?

 

After 12 hours my erase was still on step 1. I disconnected the drive. It corrupted the drive so its now useless. $60 lesson learned.

 

You maybe able to low-level format and reapply Windows (or whatever operating system was on the drive). I hope all data was saved somewhere or other. I've gone through this sort of thing, many times in the past. HD's, especially solid-state ones are so much more reliable these days. I haven't had to do low-level formatting, in over a decade.

Good luck with your fix!

Low level formatting.

 

I no longer needed the data, that's why I wanted to erase it all so I could reuse the the extended HD. When I plug it now an error message appears saying it can not be used. If I would have selected one pass erase it would have served my needs but selecting seven was a bad move.

 

Matt, I have gone thru quite a few Micro SD cards in my dash cam until I found the Samsung Micro SD card. It is well worth it!!

 

You might try formatting it on a Windoze machine as ExFAT. How big is the drive (storage not physical size).

 

1 TB it is worth trying, neighbor has one

 

I see pop up ads on some web sites. None here, but that's because I have a paid membership. None on YouTube unless they are embedded in the content, content presenter doing a pitch for example.

 

Scoots, don't worry, big capacity removable drives are out there
and really big capacity drives are in the pipeline.

although there may almost be new machines required to be able to use them because the address space will be so big.

Mike, I can remember the old 5 mbyte washtubs. literally as big as a washing machine.