Formatting large external drives: how long is too long?

Update: I took it to Apple support and very helpful senior advisor looked over with a screen share and we verify that there was no specific finding in activity monitor or console logs that acknowledged or suggested any kind of hang process; we took it through Recovery Mode version of Disk Utility ("to get the OS out of the way") and had the same thing, where it get stopped at the erasing stage, even with setting it up without encryption.

So I fired up the 2012 Catalina Mac, and it happily formatted the drive to the point where it was mounting in two minutes or less with macOS journaled or AFPS options. Then I took the formatted drive with AFPS, not encrypted, plugged it into the 2020 MacBook Pro running Monterey 12.0.1, and it happily mounted the drive and Time Machine is now backing it up and encrypting as it goes.

This experience demonstrates that the SanDisk the problem is not based in M1 architecture, because this is a very recent Intel Mac (purchased October or November 2020) running Monterey. And this same recent Intel Mac had no problem formatting an identical twin drive for Time Machine before the update from Big Sur (which came on the computer) to Monterey.

Thanks all!

And now I will go over to the other thread and link back so other people can learn from this experience that it is not M1 alone.

Ah....that makes sense.

I do try to keep the drives physically secure, but in the balance between usability, portability and security, I want the extra security of that encryption in case of theft. Burglaries are not as rare an event as one might wish in my neighborhood. I do keep things backed up on multiple physical drives. These are large drives mostly because of photography, with a library of my own images that I value but it would not be a terrible crisis if the wrong bit went bad first.

And note to self: never start this process until putting things away for the night....

This is an Intel Mac, bought just before the M1 Mac came out, but it is running Monterey. I think this disk was unformatted before (I have a duplicate in an identical Oyen Digital MiniPro housing that is working fine with Time Machine already, no hub, and it was time to set up the second backup now). I'll try formatting on the older Catalina MBP and see if I can go from there.

And still, the original question remains: how long is too long to wait before I assume the process is hanging, force quit and try something else?