Formatting a WD Elements 3TB external drive...temporary file normal?

Hi All,
I am, I hope, at the end of a 36+ hour formatting process with this WD Elements 3TB external drive. I decided to zero out the drive and when I went to bed last night at around 12am, there were about 6 hours left in the process. This morning at aroud 9am I went to check on the drive, expecting it to be ready to go, but I found it writing a temporary file. The progress bar is about 90% done. Is this part of the normal zeroing out process? If so, how long should this take? If this ISN'T part of the normal process, what should I do?
Thanks to all who read this, many thank to those who respond.

gridout1959 wrote:
but I found it writing a temporary file. The progress bar is about 90% done. Is this part of the normal zeroing out process?
Yes, DU is creating a huge file of Zeros and will confirm, the driver software will map off any failing sectors before you lay data on it.
That is a good proceedure your doing, because if you run out of spare sectors the drive is bad and you can get a refund/exchange right away.
gridout1959 wrote:
Hi All,
I am, I hope, at the end of a 36+ hour formatting process with this WD Elements 3TB external drive. .....If so, how long should this take? If this ISN'T part of the normal process, what should I do?
3TB? well 500GB should take about a hour and a half, so 9 hours and it should have been completed.
36+ hours, there is either something wrong with the drive, or DU is not prepared to handle drives in that large amount. which I suspect is more the case, but I might be wrong.
Likely 1TB is it's limit, so use partitions and zero each of those, then reformat.
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