[dnanian]

It's hard to know exactly what's going on here, but it certainly shouldn't be running this slowly. When you say it's "reasing" the drive, I assume you mean erasing?

What is sounds like is that there's a file that's being written to pretty aggressively, and that file is causing SD! to get stuck (and to fill the drive, if you left it alone). Let me suggest that you try booting in Safe Mode. To do so, shut the computer off, then hold down Shift and power on again. Keep Shift down until you get to the desktop.

Once there, don't run anything but SuperDuper! and give the backup another shot.