which card do you mean? other similar performance cards are generally a bit more expesive, 7800xt is cheaper than 7900gre but performance goes down by similar margin, so both seem great value

This is not recommended for USB connected drives

Stopped gnome-disks format at 78% (~6 hours remaining).
Used #sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda1 bs=1M seek=1001250 status=progress, write speed is ~100 MB/s.
Thanks a ton!

It’s connected over USB 3, it’s SMR

Yes I am overwriting it with zeroes while formatting (using gnome-disks). I didn’t know it did multiple overwrites, thought it did 1 pass overwrite with zeros.

Yup I am zeroing it.

That explains the declining speed. Thanks a lot for the insight!