Whether you're trying to repurpose an old hard drive ... Depending on the size of the drive, the formatting process should be completed momentarily. You can now write and read files to and ...
Make sure to have adequate backups in place before recycling your old drives. Windows and Linux both have the capabilities to manage SSDs and HDDs through formatting and creating partitions.
Back in the day, the best way to get data off an old drive was to fire up an old computer ... Microsoft Adventure which features inconsistent formatting as a form of early DRM (boo).