Bitcoin Forum

Hi Everyone...

I am trying to figure out top 5 to 10 reasons why miners fail due to ignorance of the owners. Has anyone had any unfortunate incident where the miners/boards were burnt or stopped working because of the fact that the owner of the miners missed something while setting up their farms or any such thing? Thanks for your time.

Using incorrect PSUs seems like it'd be a common reason

That's easy. I'm writing a FAQ of things in the mining support forum.

I'd say #10 is running the miner in a horse barn and having the board coated in hay and horse crap. :-)

C

I'd say the horror show pics in this thread Burnt s7 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1540037.msg15478853#msg15478853) rather qualifies as an 'unfortunate incident'...
The miner itself shorted and because it was fed by a 4kw PSU without the PCIe wire triplets being fused -- poof...

Let me know when you have it :)... Thanks.

So Bitmain's own PSU's should be fine I suppose...

My goodness...that guy really got lucky. His place would have easily caught fire. I guess Bitmain PSU's are the way to go. Do you think these Bitmain PSU's are switching power PSU's? Somebody was telling me these switching power PSU's produce harmonics. I guess I should open up a new topic on it

Only cheap low power factor ones. The raction time against the sine wave causes heat which can cause components to fail even under current limits. That's on the AC side.

A good power supply has PFC (power factor correction) so that's not a problem. Putting a fuse on each miner's supply lines is another way to prevent that sort of a fire with a larger supply.

Damn...thats...SCARY  :o :o :o :o

I am not sure how much big of quality is PSU from Bitmain, but i ordered this one:

https://shop.bitmain.com/productDetail.htm?pid=00020170920224132179WEIOvhXx06D6

I hope so nothing like that won't happen :S

What i would like to add, i saw few days ago topic on some miner, it got faulty and OP was asking why. When he posted pictures it was all dusty and dirty, so i guess you can add that on list. At least he could clear it from dust once a month or less. It was working for few months without cleaning at all, so my guess it overheated because of it.

Do note that Finsky being Finsky, no doubt the PCIe leads are 16ga and survived without even a blister. Then again, together 9x 16ga wires can carry a helluva lot of current. Connectors got toasted as aftermath of the main fault. What very obviously blew are the power planes on the PCB's.

He mentioned it was an s7 batch-1, those have no Vcore reg so the strings of chips are fed directly from the PSU with nothing at all to limit power going through the PCB other than the resistance of the copper itself. The first 3 batches of s9's are the same setup.

When a chip or something else shorted the power planes and with the board fed by a supply more than happy to dump in over 3x more than an entire 3-board miner normally takes http://www.sherv.net/cm/emo/word/explosion-smiley-emoticon.gif (http://www.sherv.net/)
Been using the Bitmain PSU's for several years with zero problems other than the fan whines more after a couple years. While a similar fault when using a more reasonably rated supply would still toast a board the result should be far less catastrophic since the PSU would shut down a lot sooner.

Oh, and all computer PSU's and pretty much all industrial ones are switchers. Other than in legacy equipment from the 70's or for very special needs I haven't seen a high power linear supply in decades.

Had no idea Bitmain has cut down so much on costs and production quality recently (well, I did know but I wasn't aware of catastrophic failures resulting from em like this). Thank god Finsky actually found those issues in time, could have been a lot worse for all of us if Bitmain got away with it. Hope they don't try to sneak in the same thing for the next batch of their future SHA miners.

Just another note to always use good, low AWG cables. Good cabling not only prevents heat issues and melting wires but can also help diagnose the root of an issue like with the faulty S7s/9s. I personally never use any cables higher than 16s with breakout boards.

Never use any molex or SATA to 6 pin connector either, they use high awg wire and the quality on those are extremely bad.

As a closer at the end of that thread, Finsky did make a point of the fact that the miners were being fed from one of his 2x DPS2000 4kw breakout boards. As a pretty righteous test of the breakout boards construction (very thick copper. 4oz/in?) the breakout survived unscathed despite what happened to the large but much thinner power planes on the hash boards.