Recuva fails but Easeus succeeds?

[HDKdesigner]

I've used Recuva before when I accidentally formatted an old hard drive full of all my data instead of a new hard drive I had just installed, so I know recuva does work and I also know generally how long it should take.  So, when My dad gave me his external 3TB drive (which I took out of its case and connected directly to my motherboard with SATA III) and it was stuck on 20% in a deep scan for almost 3 days straight, I finally decided to cancel the scan.  I tried a quick scan, which finished immediately and recuva told me that 0 files were found.  I had only performed a quick format just so windows would recognize the disk and haven't overwritten any data, so I didn't think it would be too hard for recuva to find every file.  After canceling the initial deep scan, I downloaded Easeus' data recovery software and it didn't have any trouble finding files and the whole process was estimated to take about 7 hours.  Does anyone know what the problem might be?  I have already tried reinstalling Recuva, but still had no success.  

 

If it helps, here is some more info:  The drive in question is a 3TB Western Digital Green connected via SATA III.  My OS is Windows 10 Pro 64-bit, i5 4690K, 8GB RAM.  According to my dad, he was using roughly 300GB total out of the 3TB.  I've already converted the disk to GPT and used all available space to create a new volume before I even started to scan it.  If you need any other info just let me know.

 

Thanks!