I think we had a survey of failed SP-tech kit that showed failures were extremely rare. They occur, sure but its not like you can just say the above dogie without a caveat.
That wasn't a real survey or any measure of failed equipment, that was Guy paying for a list of frilly questions like:
- Is the most trusted?
- Has the best firmware?
- Has the best support?
- Cares most about its customers? [lol]
- Is the most professional
and pays its debts? - Would you buy from next
- Gives value for money
- Hardware performs to your satisfaction
Other reasons why don't get as many failed reports as you otherwise would:
- When you have a problem you email Zvi, who emails internally to order a replacement. There is just no fixing those things once they go bad so no point posting.
- 20-40x less individual customers than Bitmain (which you're comparing them to) so even with the same failure rate you get 20-40x fewer reports.
Who did Guy pay for this?
He gave a 2 btc gift to wiki in my name for the survey Dogie mentioned.
I did do a few failed equipment surveys later (my dime my time) and
sp-tech 440 sp20's was about working and under 20 failed . corrected below
I could find that link to it:
this is the follow up survey final numbers
"so of the 313 looks like 291 still run and 22 needed parts from sp-tech or run a bit less then then should or are dead"
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1106042.msg11769009#msg11769009My opinion of the sp20 is it was okay it was really a 900 to 1300 gh miner.
It should of had a controller save. The s-5 could double up and do 4 boards.
The s-7 can do 9 boards.
My biggest fear of an sp50 is a dead controller = 110th offline = bad
As you are one of the most respected reviewers on this forum I do not believe any of the survey's were biased or based on inaccurate information. Nor do I think you made the questions to suit Guy. I think you have too much integrity to do so. Not to mention I do not think guy wanted anything but real world results.
I agree they should not have marketed the SP20 as a 1.7 TH unit. It was not in that neighborhood.
My remaining SP20s are running around 1.1 TH. I'd had them around 750 until the recent price pop. The worst thing to ever happen is on a power loss it sometimes takes one particular unit a bit longer to give me the gui. Two I purchased in the Christmas group buy and two from an outstanding forum reviewer were pushed extremely hard when I first received them because I want to know if I am going to have a problem.
I remember hearing from so many people about how pissed they were when the SP20 went out of stock. They were about to order more, and I myself was ready to pickup another nano farm, but I learned a valuable lesson in bitcoin mining.
As far as the quality of the product I think it was and still is a great, well-engineered, flexible miner. The operating life is still going strong due to caring about the end user ability to downclock.
As far as ethics, morals, and values, Guy and the SP team were straight up regarding what they intended to do, and that is what they have done. They are doing what most people here have asked why they weren't already doing, which why does a manufacturer sell to the public if they can mine for themselves? I have seen way more than a few respected forum members use this verbiage when explaining a scam to nubs or cloud mining. Granted there are some good reasons to sell to the public. I appreciated the honesty, but I don't think we have seen the last of SPT gear in our homes.
Unfortunately SPT are doing what other major manufacturers have done before them by going b2b and MOQ only and anyone reading back through this thread from January of this year can see how many people were scrambling to buy more of their gear.
Phil. thanks for your time spent, your candid opinions, and unbiased approach. When someone applies the same methods to their review style it lets us the readers know we are getting facts and you aren't swayed with money, coin, or free products to say something which isn't true.
When I initially purchased my S5+ I saw the single point of failure you mention regarding the SP50. Later I learned the modules were compatible with S7, even S5, etc. It is great to have that feature. Regarding the SP50 have you been privy to some information you can share regarding the control board / structure when you state they cannot do the same? Because I would agree, as someone who would love to have a single SP50 today, I would also want spare parts. I think if we look at the situation through SPT eyes they are going for situations where someone will purchase 15 and more, and in that vein it begins to be more reasonable to have an extra control board, hash board, etc. I see your point when looking at the situation through the eyes of a home miner, but in a real business it is the responsibility of the end user to have spare parts.
When people ask me what spare parts they should have so there is zero downtime (when they purchase my equipment) Jokingly I respond that they should have a full second machine. Seriously I have a list of the most common parts for my top tier customers who are the John Deere, Hitachi, Caterpillar and I have a list for the small mom and pop facilities who I know through asking them are not in a position to spend an additional 200k on top of the 500k they just financed. My point though is that we do what we can to engineer versatility and interchangeable items, we do everything possible to make it easy for the end user to pickup parts locally so they may stay running, but at the end of the day it is their responsibility to have those spare parts and unfortunately if we designed a fallback for every major component / situation we would price ourselves out of the market. Redundancy is a top priority.
Some people can afford to be down for a couple of days and do not even order parts to be sent overnight. If they are under warranty we cover the freight and send it overnight. We also guarantee to have a person onsite anywhere in the US within 24 hours or less, and intercontinental is generally a 48 hour guarantee, but there have been situations where we negotiate 72 hours because even in these modern times some places can be a bit unrealistic when it comes to travel.
If you look at what SPT have openly stated their business model is going forward, the results of your surveys, and the comments on the forum when SPT were selling to home miners, there should not be any question they held the title for best overall mining experience.
If we add in everything that has been developed since then I don't know if we are giving things a fair shot. I recall most of the respected forum reviewers giving SPT the top mining manufacturer title, even to the point of when they told us they'd lost money selling home miners people said it was because they had built such a quality product they priced themselves into that situation.
I think it is easy to come back now and bend the facts a bit, not saying you did Phil, but in general, say someone did have an obvious vendetta or reason to throw mud. Well, it is easy to do so, we have seen 3 or 4 models released this year from bitmain? It hasn't been the area where SPT have been working since the SP20 release. That is a great deal of time in the engineering world and I am speculating when I say the SP50 is a product made for a real business, they shared the intention of doing such, and they did it. From that perspective I don't see how anyone could say anything negative at all.
Personally I still wish SPT were making home miners and I
wish we had a real competition going on, but unfortunately the land is ruled by one at this time as far as we as home miners can be concerned.
When making the decision to purchase something for my home versus business I expect to deal with a completely different list of requirements and quality. I also usually pay a great deal more for those things. When speculating about the SP50 I believe we must expect to see a much higher level of quality, redundancy, and support in various forms. The SP50 specifications look bad to us as home users because we see 110TH with a single point of failure, or what are you going to do when you are done with it, but from a business perspective you would be looking at the density because floor space isn't cheap in a facility with the right power, you look at uptime forecasts, you evaluate how many you can fit in your facility, how quickly you can get replacement parts, you expect downtime and allott for it in your model, you evaluate the support structure, skype, phone calls, times it is simply a completely different outlook. It is professional. If reselling the unit must be done for a real business to make profits then you are not going to find many real businessmen interested. Keeping a graveyard of parts and old models is great to help yourself or provide your end users with more support options but a real business plan does not revolve around such.
The people purchasing 30 - 50 or more SP50s have a quite different list of expectations and I believe we should all consider such when evaluating the product versus maintaining our tunnel vision of the home miner. The SP50 or some variant is a / the future of mining and we will be required to adapt to it to stay in the game on a serious level. I am not looking forward to more light bulbs and 21s version of a revolutionary product. I love playing with my compacs and can't wait to see the pods, but when we are talking serious hashrate I want to see 10TH on 240 v as a minimum and noise is not a factor. SPT developed a product with a completely different end user in mind.
