Disk Utility extremely slow at erasing new Western Digital drive

Hi recently bought two WD drives to store identical copies of files on both drives for archival purposes.

The second drive was becoming incredibly slow as as it was getting filled up with data.

I decided to erase it and re-copy the files from the first drive, but even erasing the drive is proving to be difficult.

It took over 15 min to complete the following task:

Is this normal? It did eventually succeed and mount the drive, but I've never experienced such a slow and long Disk Utility erase process...

I will try to copy all the files over but have a feeling it will be abnormally slow again as the disk becomes fuller with data being copied onto it.

Is there something to do with the needle on the HDD plate starting at the centre of the disk and eventually being further away from it. Could it have major faults near the outer parts of the disk but not near the centre? Which would explain why at first it seems ok but eventually the drive is failing to copy files in a reasonable amount of time.

Update:

After formatting, Disk Utility shows the following which looks wrong! Any idea if that confirms the drive is faulty?