Formatting large external disk

Don't use ntfs. it is not a linux filesystem and will cause you problems due to lack of linux owner/permissions, and ideally don't use another system to format.

The filesystem should be made on OMV, but the drive needs to be wiped first. Often a quick wipe works, but there is also an issue where a GPT partitioned drive sometimes needs a second quick wipe before it becomes available.

If that doesn't work, a secure wipe is required, but this can often be cancelled after a few percentage points as long as it has erased the pertinent signatures.

Another option that may work, would be to completely remove all partitions from the drive using a disk manager in windows, such as the bult in disk manager, minitool partition wizard, AOMEI partition assistant, etc., so that the drive is in a similar state to when it came off the assembly line, but before any partitioning and formatting.

Quote from ryecoaaron

sounds like the disk is failing. look at the output of sudo dmesg

I'd be inclined to think the drive might be usb2 connected. I had a couple of old zotac mini pic's myself and recall them having a mix of usb2 and usb3, so you need to use the right port.

Quote from ryecoaaron

USB2 isn't that slow. It can still do 40MB/s+. 4 days and 2% is less than 2 mbps which is slower than usb1.

That may be, but with some experience with those little zotac boxes, I'd still suspect something with them as a first point to check into. They were odd little things that didn't give full usb speeds and used some odd hardware and drivers. I have seen odd stuff with externally connected drives being very slow or not being detected at all. When I was running 2 of them for various reasons before I got a sensible system for a NAS many years ago that had enough resources to do some VMs as well as be a NAS, I do remember having issues getting one to run ubuntu with direct attached storage for an owncloud or first release of nextcloud install, and ended up using it just as a "head" to run owncloud/nextcloud with storage on the NAS I had.

Quote from StevieRay

Maybe - as you wrote - the disk shouldn't have a partition... but formatting whithout a partition?!? Mmmhhh.

In simple terms, omv wants the drives to have no premade format or partition when it is creating the filesystems as it want to do that stuff itself. Creating them on another system may not have them created as the particular OS version's tools expect them to be. This is why you are supposed to wipe a pre-used disk and let OMV take control of it.

If you remove all the partitions, then hook the drive up, you should be able to let omv make a filesystem. If it still requires a quick wipe at that point it should work correctly since there is nothing on the drive to get in the way of the process.