[ANN] US/North American Bitfury sales NEW STOCK ***NOW SHIPPING***

[allinvain]

you cant really compare bitfury and antminer,  when antminer uses double the power.... the market sets the price.....  so as long as people are paying what bitfury asks.... then the price is fair....   when people are no longer buying..... the price should drop.....    basic economics.....  if you are selling something at $400,    and people buy it....  why would you drop the price?   
 

At 15 cents per kilowatt hour, the Antminer only uses ~$20 more in electricity per month at ~200 GH/s, so clearly BitFury gear should not command such a large price premium.

Exactly, 20 a month isn't anything to get the miner now and cheap! I bought 1 antminer at 4.25 four at 2.25 I will get crazy with it at 1.45, And the antminer is standalone, no backplane no rasberry pi no sd card. Just plug it in and program it, then leave it alone.

I would think that when bitmain was doing slow releases with group buy and auction, bitfury had more business because of shorter supply and they were the same price per gh, I would assume now they are going to have to get more price competitive to keep in the game.

+1. Even if the bitfury was price-competitive (factoring in a small premium for lower power draw), it is not a plug-and-play system. it needs tweaking, has trouble standing upright, and seems to obliterate SD cards just a little too frequently. I had a power outtage for 1hour, and all the antminers came back online without a problem. the bitfury sat for almost a day because it fried the SD card (second card it has totally trashed, not just corrupted) and I had to go and purchase 2 new cards for it.

This might be a little bit more complex to setup, but have you looked into booting the Raspberry PI off of a NFS network share (network booting essentially). This way constant writes or power outages will not kill your sd cards.

[klondike_bar]

you cant really compare bitfury and antminer,  when antminer uses double the power.... the market sets the price.....  so as long as people are paying what bitfury asks.... then the price is fair....   when people are no longer buying..... the price should drop.....    basic economics.....  if you are selling something at $400,    and people buy it....  why would you drop the price?   
 

At 15 cents per kilowatt hour, the Antminer only uses ~$20 more in electricity per month at ~200 GH/s, so clearly BitFury gear should not command such a large price premium.

Exactly, 20 a month isn't anything to get the miner now and cheap! I bought 1 antminer at 4.25 four at 2.25 I will get crazy with it at 1.45, And the antminer is standalone, no backplane no rasberry pi no sd card. Just plug it in and program it, then leave it alone.

I would think that when bitmain was doing slow releases with group buy and auction, bitfury had more business because of shorter supply and they were the same price per gh, I would assume now they are going to have to get more price competitive to keep in the game.

+1. Even if the bitfury was price-competitive (factoring in a small premium for lower power draw), it is not a plug-and-play system. it needs tweaking, has trouble standing upright, and seems to obliterate SD cards just a little too frequently. I had a power outtage for 1hour, and all the antminers came back online without a problem. the bitfury sat for almost a day because it fried the SD card (second card it has totally trashed, not just corrupted) and I had to go and purchase 2 new cards for it.

This might be a little bit more complex to setup, but have you looked into booting the Raspberry PI off of a NFS network share (network booting essentially). This way constant writes or power outages will not kill your sd cards.

that might not be a bad idea, but it would still require an SD card in the rPi, which seems to be the weak point in any case. plus, I use a laptop so probably not a solution if i am jumping around the house and/or leaving the network at times.

Once its up and running its fine - its just the power changes that kill the cards so I leave the system to do its thing undisturbed

[Taugeran]

you cant really compare bitfury and antminer,  when antminer uses double the power.... the market sets the price.....  so as long as people are paying what bitfury asks.... then the price is fair....   when people are no longer buying..... the price should drop.....    basic economics.....  if you are selling something at $400,    and people buy it....  why would you drop the price?   
 

At 15 cents per kilowatt hour, the Antminer only uses ~$20 more in electricity per month at ~200 GH/s, so clearly BitFury gear should not command such a large price premium.

Exactly, 20 a month isn't anything to get the miner now and cheap! I bought 1 antminer at 4.25 four at 2.25 I will get crazy with it at 1.45, And the antminer is standalone, no backplane no rasberry pi no sd card. Just plug it in and program it, then leave it alone.

I would think that when bitmain was doing slow releases with group buy and auction, bitfury had more business because of shorter supply and they were the same price per gh, I would assume now they are going to have to get more price competitive to keep in the game.

+1. Even if the bitfury was price-competitive (factoring in a small premium for lower power draw), it is not a plug-and-play system. it needs tweaking, has trouble standing upright, and seems to obliterate SD cards just a little too frequently. I had a power outtage for 1hour, and all the antminers came back online without a problem. the bitfury sat for almost a day because it fried the SD card (second card it has totally trashed, not just corrupted) and I had to go and purchase 2 new cards for it.

This might be a little bit more complex to setup, but have you looked into booting the Raspberry PI off of a NFS network share (network booting essentially). This way constant writes or power outages will not kill your sd cards.

that might not be a bad idea, but it would still require an SD card in the rPi, which seems to be the weak point in any case. plus, I use a laptop so probably not a solution if i am jumping around the house and/or leaving the network at times.

Once its up and running its fine - its just the power changes that kill the cards so I leave the system to do its thing undisturbed

The issue with the rpi and sd card corruption/murder lies in using the CARD as the OS storage space and chainminer is constantly reading/writing to that space in the form of logs, etc .

The rpi requires an sd card to boot.

But if properly configured with your favorite bootloader, u-boot for example, this can point to anywhere to load the OS: SD card, USB drive (flash or hdd), NFS(would most difficult to configure), etc.

Then after bootloader passes off execution to the kernel, if it's not located on the sd card, voila, sd card comm is no longer needed and corruption should not be an issue.

I can akin it to telling the windows loader on an x86 system:

Default: hdd0, load windows 7
Opt 1: hdd1, load windows xp
Opt 2: hdd2, load Linux



YES it can be done. NO,  it is not as easy as

Code:

sudo dd bs=2m if=raspian.img of=/dev/path/to/sdcard

TL;DR I'll try an come up with a guide for anyone who wishes to try it out. I would do a video on actual bitfury hardware if I had any(waiting on tax return :/).  But at least I can demonstrate it on an rPi.


GUIDE TO COME..... soon!

[allinvain]

Here is a howto I found on how to get the Pi to boot from an NFS share.

http://www.whaleblubber.ca/boot-raspberry-pi-nfs/

It really should not be all that difficult and since you're not actively using the SD card it will no longer corrupt them. The bootloader is the only thing loaded from the SDcard and that's a READ ONLY operation.

[bobcaticus]

this is a great idea, and i'd love to document it.  shoot me an email jason@megabigpower.com and we can talk.

[goxed]

Some good SD cards are on sale. They survived a lot of freak reboots in my PIs w/o issues but are not 100% immune. Way better than some of the class 4 junk.
http://slickdeals.net/f/6698720-2-pack-sony-16gb-sdhc-memory-card-class-10-uhs-i-up-to-94mbs-read-45mbs-write-25-free-shipping?src=pdw

[Taugeran]

ok instead of reinventing the wheel: http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=44177

link off of the raspberry pi official forums on setting up boot to a usb drive. to test it i followed the procedure on a virgin raspian installation and a 16G PNY flash drive and am happy to say working well. the guide is very thorough.

[Cablez]

I always wanted to try this approach as it seemed fairly easy.  No guarantee it works though, maybe someone else can test it?  https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/1187/boot-from-external-usb-stick-drive

[xzempt]

The 1.45 btc is an amazing price......  maybe antminers will look nice beside my bitfury rigs..... and its tax refund season.... mbp ill wait til monday to see if u drop prices,  if not 3 antminers will be enroute to me

[TrollboxChamp]

I can personally say i refrained from purchasing due to poor business tactics(price gouging) by MBP...

[klondike_bar]

I can personally say i refrained from purchasing due to poor business tactics(price gouging) by MBP...

+1. I have 7 bitfury cards in my septemer starter kit and 7 antminer S1s - Bitfury accounts for only 15% of my hashing power, almost exclusively because there is no reason to buy more boards when they are so horribly overpriced. 5 of the boards I have I got for free because my september kit was one of the delayed batch and I had to wait months until a viable opportunity to use my store credit

Whoever is in charge of business strategy clearly doesnt care about selling to the public, or is only concerned about the private mining facility

[Swimmer63]

9 Ants and counting.  1.8 Th/s

[Unacceptable]

9 Ants and counting.  1.8 Th/s

Any network trouble with that many   Using switches,router or WiFi 

[klondike_bar]

9 Ants and counting.  1.8 Th/s

Any network trouble with that many   Using switches,router or WiFi 

9 isnt many (think about the asicminer backplane where all 10 cards needed a connection!)

I personally am using a 48-port HP Prolink switch i got used for $10. Im only using a half-dozen of its ports, but its a great peice of hardware, runs on 120V, and is dead-easry to set up, connecting its trunk to one of the LAN ports on my wireless router

[salfter]

9 Ants and counting.  1.8 Th/s

Any network trouble with that many   Using switches,router or WiFi 

Why would there be?  Mining isn't a particularly bandwidth-heavy activity:




The first chart is from a 9-card Bitfury rig with two BFL Jalapeños hanging off it.  The second is from an Antminer.  The combined average traffic for the two is only about 6 kbps inbound and 2 kbps outbound. The 14.4-kbps modem I bought for my BBS back in '90 or '91 would handle that. 

[Trongersoll]

I just noticed that they are no longer offering starter kits. 

[bobcaticus]

I just noticed that they are no longer offering starter kits. 

Hi everyone -

Just a heads up that our M-boards were delayed due to Chinese New Year.  They should be in by Feb 21st.  H-boards are in stock, though.

[Unacceptable]

9 Ants and counting.  1.8 Th/s

Any network trouble with that many   Using switches,router or WiFi 

9 isnt many (think about the asicminer backplane where all 10 cards needed a connection!)

I personally am using a 48-port HP Prolink switch i got used for $10. Im only using a half-dozen of its ports, but its a great peice of hardware, runs on 120V, and is dead-easry to set up, connecting its trunk to one of the LAN ports on my wireless router

Thanks for shareing the info!! I have an HP Procurve switch 2224/24 port,got it for free  :



So I should be good to go 

Thanks guys!!!!

[klondike_bar]

9 Ants and counting.  1.8 Th/s

Any network trouble with that many   Using switches,router or WiFi 

9 isnt many (think about the asicminer backplane where all 10 cards needed a connection!)

I personally am using a 48-port HP Prolink switch i got used for $10. Im only using a half-dozen of its ports, but its a great peice of hardware, runs on 120V, and is dead-easry to set up, connecting its trunk to one of the LAN ports on my wireless router

Thanks for shareing the info!! I have an HP Procurve switch 2224/24 port,got it for free  :



So I should be good to go 

Thanks guys!!!!

yours does not seem to have designated 'trunk' port(s). (on mine, there are 48 10/100 ports plus 2 10/100/1000 ports that can be used for the link to the router. With yours, plugging any port of the switch to a LAN port from your router should do the trick. Ive only used static IPs and those work without a hitch. havent tried any DHCP but i dont see it being a problem

[Swimmer63]

9 Ants and counting.  1.8 Th/s

Any network trouble with that many   Using switches,router or WiFi 

No, but all mine are hard wired.  I have not attempted/needed to use wifi. 
I just love that these things are like tanks or like Asicminer blades.  They are tough and never fritz out like the h-boards.
As long as I have had them I only have had one mysteriously stop mining.  I was able to reset it remotely and started right up again.  Not sure what the issue was but it never repeated.
They do take up space though.  I only stack them 2 high.