How to delete mega-gig folders in hours or minutes instead of days?

I recently had my computer repaired, a new hard drive installed, and any materials that were not recognized as obvious duplicates were stored on the drive. Now my space is practically maxed out, especially by 4 folders of audio files, each of which is a duplicate and each containing more than 50 gigs. When I do a folder delete or drag a folder to the trash, it requires many many hours, sometimes resulting in a "trash crash"--perhaps due to one defective file that simply won't delete. My next strategy was to attach a couple of external drives--an Iomega and Seagate, both configured for Mac. I thought I could transfer my folders to the drives and then use the "Erase" feature in Disk Utility. However, I'm discovering that dragging the folders to the drives doesn't actually "move" the folders: it merely "copies" them to the drive. Rather than solve the problem, I've increased it (doubling the number of problematic folders)! Short of deleting thousands of files one at a time, or bringing my computer back to a professional, is there some way I can get rid of the unwanted folders? Can an external storage drive be set so that, rather than copying my extra folders, it simply stores them? Thanks for any illumination. Cap

The fastest way to do this would be to use the Unix command line. One very simple command could wipe out all of those files, however you at least need to know the basics about navigating a filesystem in Unix.
How comfortable do you feel about doing something like this? Because this is kind of like taking away all the safeguards that the Mac UI has in place. If you mess up the commands, there is a possibility of hosing the entire OS. If you can follow instructions exactly, there should be no risk, but miss a few key characters, and things can go very wrong very fast.
So, if you have any doubt about this, why not just delete the files in chunks instead of all at once? Just delete one folder at a time since you say there are 4 of them. Or if I'm misreading things, just grab like 100 files at a time, and delete those. It's tedious, but you only need to do it once. You can just format the external drives. Which is also always an option, if you're willing to start over with a virgin OS.

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How to delete mega-gig folders in hours or minutes instead of days?

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