Chkdsk stuck on 16 percent for 3 hours on ExFAT External SSD (2Tb) Safe to shutdown system?

Hi

I was transferring data between 2 laptops A 12 year old Windows 8 laptop and a recent win11 laptop. After easily copying a few files (around 2 gb) from the older laptop and connecting the SSD (ExFAT 2Tb External USB)to the newer laptop, the external ssd was very slow and didnt succeed copying even a 250 Mb file. After switching to the older laptop the system indicated the disk volume is dirty. i ran chkdsk without any flags on the win8 system. It ran chkdskfor a while and returned with no errors. But still indicated the volume dirty. Now its on the win11 laptop for nearly 4 hours running chkdsk without any flags and its at 16 percent for more than 3.5 hours now.

Should or can i shut the system down? Or should i wait for the chkdsk to complete and leave the system alone?

Also, i think i would be needing to run chkdsk /f /r again later, should i wait or stop chkdsk?

PS: The external SSD is my backup disk andi dont want to lose the data.

Thanks in advance