Ambitious? Maybe. Welcome to LR forums. What is happening to you right now is that the import is reading the embedded capture date from every image file on your drive so it can create date named folders. It is an external drive so that may be slower than if it were on the local bus.
If you would kindly fill in your user profile, I'd know more about your system and could give you a more complete answer. Trying to do this on a 2GB XP machine might get tedious. A 54''RPM HD is going to be slower than a 72''prm drive. Running this on the latest quad core Win 7 or Mac will be zippier but still take a while to read all those dates.
If you like, you can stop the process or let it run its course. You chose to inport into a new location and organize by one of the date named folder schemes. LR needs to know that dates before it begins the import. So you haven't even started the import. LR is just collection information.
If you stop this process, no harm is done and you get to start over.
There are other choices besides a data folder scheme. You can opt to "Import the files without moving" Or you can move them to a different folder and organise by original folders Or you can use one of the date named folder schemes and import in smaller subsets untill you have completed the import process. You don't need to import everything or everything at once , You might want to start with the most recent or the most important and catch the remainder when you are a little farther down the road.
