External hard drive taking really long time to reformat

I'm reformatting a Seagate 2TB external hard drive that connects using USB 3.0 to my 2014 Macbook Pro (OS X 10.9.4).
For some idiotic reason (because I had never used it before and wanted to see what happened), when I went to reformat the drive in Disk Utility from FAT32 into 'Mac OS Journaled (Extended)' I selected the option for "7 Pass Secure Erase".  It initially told me it should take "1 day, 7 hours", which seemed like a lot but was consistent with what other Support Communities people have said for such a large drive.
It's now been reformatting for 20 hours, and the estimated time remaining says "1 day, 1 hour".  The progress bar has moved and it says it's on pass #3, but this seems like it's taking an abnormally long time.  Has something gone wrong?  For reference, I did a 1-pass into reformat into FAT32 on a similar 1TB external and it only took me around 20 minutes (so I estimated the new one would take ~5 hours (20 * ~2X storage space, 7 passes). I know "estimated time" on a computer always defies the laws of mathematics, but if "6 hours" is actually 20 hours, will I really be waiting for another 80 hours?  Can I do anything to speed this up?
More importantly, can I stop the reformat and try it a gain with 1-pass, now that I've initiated the idiot way of doing it?  I don't want to screw the drive up or make it unreadable, it's brand new, but I don't want to have to leave my laptop on for the next 3 and a half days.
Please help!  Thanks so much!

SquareWarren wrote:
I'm reformatting a Seagate 2TB external hard drive that connects using USB 3.0...
...I know "estimated time" on a computer always defies the laws of mathematics, but if "6 hours" is actually 20 hours, will I really be waiting for another 80 hours?  Can I do anything to speed this up?...
I don't know which Seagate external you're using but my experience with a number of GoFlex externals has been that very little thought was given to ventilation, and, as a result, the drives tended to overheat. Watching the transfer rate using Activity Monitor during normal backup use, I found that after running a while and getting hot, the transfer rate went from MB's to KB's/sec. You're not actually transferring anything but the drive is being written to, so I'd expect the write speed to drop and what is already going to be a long process will just get longer. Sorry.

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