“USB 3.0 6TB HDD I would say between 10 to 14 hours if doing a full format and everything is working optimally.”
Yep! I really doubt he did this. A 1.6 TB dump on disk not fully formatted is going to take a LONG time as the disk is formatted on the fly.
Maybe, he said he used them new from box and they were already NTSC. WD would have done a full format at the factory, I hope.