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Two days ago I bought two external HDDs (Western Digital Passports), 6 TB each. I then copied (drag & drop method) a folder from an old WD passport to the new, larger one. Folder contained over 2,900 MP4 files, 29 subfolders, at about 1.97 TB total. It took over 8 hours to copy.

A Amazon review of the WD 6TB My Passport, Portable External Hard Drive says it has a a 107-115 MBs transfer speed (product specs say 120 megabytes per second). https://www.perplexity.ai says that at a constant transfer speed of 115 MB/s, it should take approximately 4 hours and 50 minutes to copy 2TB of data.

So you may be using a USB 2.0 port and or cable. You can check your speed using Crystal disk mark, and USBDeview is a free utility that lists all USB devices connected or previously used on your computer, with detailed information and options to uninstall, disconnect, or enable/disable them.

But slow Windows "calculating" and copying has been an issue for years, thus the recommendations of free alternatives. Presuming HDD means SSD, Also:

Microsoft admits Windows 11 File Explorer can be slow when using title bar buttons

But most important is that what is worth saving is good in the eyes of God (though much is a mixed bag today). Hopefully all I have will be.

Whatever the specs, when I copied these files, Win 11 would say the speed was from 90 something MB per second to the 60s.

Every now and then, Win 11 would stop entirely to calculate, so the speed was 0.

It's a new Lenovo. The USB should be 3.0.