With only 8GB RAM your node can't hold the chainstate in memory and has to do a lot of I/O to your HDD (painfully slow at random access I/O) to properly build the UTXO set which is stored in the chainstate folder.

Is it intentional that you have a pruned node which doesn't store more than 2GB of block data? You could store an unpruned blockchain on your 1TB HDD if it's not used for anything else.


If he deletes chainstate folder, his pruned node will have to re-download the whole blockchain again. Apparently the same is needed when he deletes the blocks folder.