Tech support on the drive enclosure eventually determined that there's a USB problem in OS-X 10.4.5 and up. I took the enclosure to a neighbor's house with an older OS-X installation, and it formatted in 30 seconds.
I have the same trouble. It's a USB enclosure because that's the one I wanted. I haven't waited 10 hours, but there's no progress bar. Disk Utility shows the drive just fine, but Erasing it seems to go nowhere.
Thanks,
Stefan
