Formatting disk from USB

I recently needed to wipe a laptop's disk. I used Rufus and Puppy Linux (ISO size was 409MB) to create a bootable USB drive. After booting into Puppy Linux, I used the following commands:

1. lsblk to see disk partitions and their sizes
2. lsblk -f to see partition file systems
3. sudo mkfs -t ntfs /dev/<partition>

Formatting a disk (initializing with zeros) of 500GB can take 3 hours.