Thanks Jerome. I figured it out.
In case anyone else has this question, my problem was because I was using '-reindex' in the console, rather than adding it to the bitcoin-qt.exe to run (via command line- "Z:\Bitcoin\bitcoin-qt -reindex").
I am not sure whether deleting chainstate would have cause issues, but it does seem that reindex has done that and synced from block 1 to (currently) August 2018 in 3 hours using only 13MB of bandwidth. HDD bottlenecked for the first 8 years, and CPU for the last 2 years worth.
In case anyone else has this question, my problem was because I was using '-reindex' in the console, rather than adding it to the bitcoin-qt.exe to run (via command line- "Z:\Bitcoin\bitcoin-qt -reindex").
I am not sure whether deleting chainstate would have cause issues, but it does seem that reindex has done that and synced from block 1 to (currently) August 2018 in 3 hours using only 13MB of bandwidth. HDD bottlenecked for the first 8 years, and CPU for the last 2 years worth.
Its nice you figured that on your own
I was about to write a post telling you it's a runtime parameter, but here's a merit. Good luck running your node!