What is the average lifespan of an ASIC miner ?

[stigo]

Hi,

Suppose that Asic miner is working 24/24 and 7/7 in normal conditions with free electricity

What is the average Hardware lifespan ?

I will appreciate any documentation about this

Thanks

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[NotFuzzyWarm]

Free electricity is irrelevant and by design miners are intended to run 24x7x365.

That said, it depends on the make and model. If kept reasonably clean and ran in reasonable temperatures the Avalons from Canaan can easily last many many years. I have over a dozen A841's from 2018 that are still running perfectly with zero maintenance (but in clean environment).

Miners from Bitmain are more of a crapshoot. I have a R4 from 2017 that still runs flawlessly and 2 others that died in about 2 years. Early s9's were near bullet-proof up to around batch-9, later ones up to a 15-20% failure rate within 2-3 years OR LESS.

[mikeywith]

What is the average Hardware lifespan ?

I will appreciate any documentation about this

Thanks

There is no answer to this question, and am pretty sure you won't find any documented studies in that regard, the ASIC mining industry is relatively new, and gears become obsolete quite too often, so they switch hands very fast from the ones who have high power rate to those who pay less until it eventually ends up in the hands of those who have free power or the gear could be scrapped.

With that in mind, most used gears have little to no information on them, you buy a used gear that has changed hands a couple of times until it got to the seller, you don't know if it has been mining for a month or a year, and thus whatever numbers you get to will be far from accurate.

The second issue is the fact that the quality of every mining gear is very different, every model is different, and even within the same model every batch will be different, you are talking about Chinese manufacturers that have little to no quality control, so if you ask me about Bitmain failure rate regarding the 17 series, It has now easily passed 80% failure rate in less than 2 years, if you ask phill he got lucky the s17 pro version and has almost no failure rate, we bought the same gears, probably a few months apart and have very different failure rate.

My S9is and S9js have been pretty solid, my S9ks and S9se died in no time, my M21s has been mining day and night with no issue, some other people have their M21s die in a few months, there are no official numbers on which you can count on, even the manufacturer themselves don't reveal those numbers (assuming they have them), the only time Bitmain admitted a high failure rate was when Jihan Wu had to calm down the angry Chinese miners who were complaining about high failure rate on the 17 series, and he did admit that the rate was above 30% or more if I could remember the article correctly, but aside from that, there are no official statements.

As a general rule, you should assume that a brand new gear would last you 12 months, a used one will last half that period, while that isn't going to always be the case, it's not uncommon for gears to die in a few months, so if you place your business model on the assumption that you will get lucky and have those gears mine for years, you could and probably will be very disappointed.

[NotFuzzyWarm]

Mikey brings up a good point talking about miners being resold possibly multiple times: You included the point of "free electricity" in the OP. The only reason that should matter is if you are getting used & older, less power efficient, hardware. Point being the question for you that should bring is, "the hardware is x years old, how much longer will it last?"

Are you looking at using/getting old to very old gear?

[kano]

Well, of the thousands I've seen and heard about in the past, most last quite a lot longer than just 1 year, and indeed the older Canaan miners have a reasonably good record compared to many other miners.

Of course there will be some % that will not survive that, but that % can also depend on other factors.

One (small) factor that I would suggest, over the last few years, is that more BM miners have been treated worse than before, due to people over clocking them and destroying them much faster, then selling them off, if they still work, to some sucker who may have been ignorant of this going on with every after market firmware that exists.
To understand this for anyone who's not sure about what that means: it's very much like if someone wanted a great GPU for gaming, then bought it 2nd hand from someone who had it running 24/7, hot, mining some scamcoin for 6 or more months, you'd pity anyone who would buy that card 2nd hand, since you would certainly expect a shorter life for it, compared to someone playing games with it even daily for 6 months.

[stigo]

Mikey brings up a good point talking about miners being resold possibly multiple times: You included the point of "free electricity" in the OP. The only reason that should matter is if you are getting used & older, less power efficient, hardware. Point being the question for you that should bring is, "the hardware is x years old, how much longer will it last?"

Are you looking at using/getting old to very old gear?

Yes I'm going to Re-use old miners

[stigo]

Thank you all for these answers.

So when you said a miner is dead, this means that probably ( with high probability ) one or more sha256 chips are KO. Is this chip the most fragile component on a miner?  and overclocking them reduce drastically their lifespan ?

Are there other reasons that reduce the lifespan?

[mikeywith]

So when you said a miner is dead, this means that probably ( with high probability ) one or more sha256 chips are KO. Is this chip the most fragile component on a miner? 

There are other components that fail, but most of the time is a dead chip or a few of them, if you think that is a small problem which can be easily and cheaply fixed then you need to do more research, the average fix for a chip would be in the $100 range including labor, of course it depends on where you live, but if you are going to buy a used gear for $400 today, chances are by the time it needs fixing you can buy it for $200, fixing a single chip for $100 or even $50 does not make any sense, so more often than not and especially with the old gears, once a single chip dies, the whole board is rendered dead as far as logic is concerned.

Another common issue would be the PSU, many gears are known to have fragile PSU, and the problem is, most gears today don't use a universal 12v PSU which you can buy of anywhere, they rather use their own designed built-in PSU which in most cases are hard to find, many people have perfectly working miners that need PSU and can't find them.

and overclocking them reduce drastically their lifespan ?

I am not sure about "drastically" but at least in theory overclocking any gear will reduce its lifespan, but it's always a question of how solid that piece of gear is, I have seen overclocked gears that run over 100c all day long for months and months without an issue, on the other hand, many gears that run on stock settings died way too soon, of course, if the latter group was overclocked - chances are they would have died a lot sooner, but it all boils down to how solid that gear is.

[stigo]

There are other components that fail, but most of the time is a dead chip or a few of them, if you think that is a small problem which can be easily and cheaply fixed then you need to do more research, the average fix for a chip would be in the $100 range including labor, of course it depends on where you live, but if you are going to buy a used gear for $400 today, chances are by the time it needs fixing you can buy it for $200, fixing a single chip for $100 or even $50 does not make any sense, so more often than not and especially with the old gears, once a single chip dies, the whole board is rendered dead as far as logic is concerned.

Another common issue would be the PSU, many gears are known to have fragile PSU, and the problem is, most gears today don't use a universal 12v PSU which you can buy of anywhere, they rather use their own designed built-in PSU which in most cases are hard to find, many people have perfectly working miners that need PSU and can't find them.

Thanks for these details . I know that is not easy to change a chip but I used to do this kind of task with professional material.

if it is not 12V do you know the DC voltage of their own designed Built-in PSUs ? do you know a miner reference?

[mikeywith]

if it is not 12V do you know the DC voltage of their own designed Built-in PSUs ? do you know a miner reference?

It's different for every model or a set of models, for example, the APW9's output is 14.5V-21V DC which is the same voltage for the APW9+, but each is suitable for different models, you can't mix PSUs, the miner won't start.

Also, it's isn't just a matter of matching the voltage, most new miners connect to the hash boards using direct busbars at a very specific orientation, so even if you managed to trick the firmware to accept a different PSU it will be hard to deal with the connectors, so long story short, it will be extremely difficult to use any PSU except the one that the manufacturer itself makes.

This is why one should always stick to buying the same model, doing so, you end up with spare parts to revive different miners, if you have 10 gears, one loses a PSU, another loses hash boards and the 3rd one loses a control board, you can mix the parts and end up with only 1 dead miner as opposed to 3, but if you buy 1-2 of every model, you will be in trouble.

[stigo]

if it is not 12V do you know the DC voltage of their own designed Built-in PSUs ? do you know a miner reference?

It's different for every model or a set of models, for example, the APW9's output is 14.5V-21V DC which is the same voltage for the APW9+, but each is suitable for different models, you can't mix PSUs, the miner won't start.

Also, it's isn't just a matter of matching the voltage, most new miners connect to the hash boards using direct busbars at a very specific orientation, so even if you managed to trick the firmware to accept a different PSU it will be hard to deal with the connectors, so long story short, it will be extremely difficult to use any PSU except the one that the manufacturer itself makes.

This is why one should always stick to buying the same model, doing so, you end up with spare parts to revive different miners, if you have 10 gears, one loses a PSU, another loses hash boards and the 3rd one loses a control board, you can mix the parts and end up with only 1 dead miner as opposed to 3, but if you buy 1-2 of every model, you will be in trouble.

Ok I just saw pictures of the connection between the APW9 and S19 .
Difficult but possible to replace this connection with short power cables .

Thanks

[NotFuzzyWarm]

Ok I just saw pictures of the connection between the APW9 and S19 .
Difficult but possible to replace this connection with short power cables .

The power connections are not the problem. How the PSU's work is the problem: Modern miners do not use a fixed, universally available 12VDC input like older miners did.

In older miners 12VDC was fed to each hash board and each board had a second-stage regulator on them that lowered the 12V to a level suitable to feed the strings of chips. Those secondary regulators introduced an efficiency loss plus the low voltage limited the number of chips that can be in a string. Modern miners directly control the PSU to set voltage to the strings and that voltage will be variable to somewhere between 15 and 21VDC depending on the model of miner and the miner settings. So, now not only are there more chips in each string but the voltage fed to them is now directly adjustable by the miner controller talking to a custom PSU and because there are no secondary regulators that increases efficiency by several %.

[philipma1957]

Ok I just saw pictures of the connection between the APW9 and S19 .
Difficult but possible to replace this connection with short power cables .

The power connections are not the problem. How the PSU's work is the problem: Modern miners do not use a fixed, universally available 12VDC input like older miners did.

In older miners 12VDC was fed to each hash board and each board had a second regulator on them that lowered the 12V to a level suitable to feed the strings of chips. Those secondary regulators introduced an efficiency loss plus the low voltage limited the number of chips that can be in a string. Modern miners directly control the PSU to set voltage to the strings and that voltage will be variable to somewhere between 15 and 21VDC depending on the model of miner and the miner settings. So, now not only are there more chips in each string but the voltage fed to them is now directly adjustable by the miner controller talking to a custom PSU and because there are no secondary regulators that increases efficiency by several %.

to be clear the controller looks at the oem psu and reads its name model number.

so if your replacement psu has a different model number the controller says fuck you I want model 1 and you gave me model 1a

I had this happen with whatsminer gear. the psu died they shipped me an upgraded psu

P11 vs p10 and the controller needed new firmware to read the new psu.

[stigo]

Ok I just saw pictures of the connection between the APW9 and S19 .
Difficult but possible to replace this connection with short power cables .

The power connections are not the problem. How the PSU's work is the problem: Modern miners do not use a fixed, universally available 12VDC input like older miners did.

In older miners 12VDC was fed to each hash board and each board had a second regulator on them that lowered the 12V to a level suitable to feed the strings of chips. Those secondary regulators introduced an efficiency loss plus the low voltage limited the number of chips that can be in a string. Modern miners directly control the PSU to set voltage to the strings and that voltage will be variable to somewhere between 15 and 21VDC depending on the model of miner and the miner settings. So, now not only are there more chips in each string but the voltage fed to them is now directly adjustable by the miner controller talking to a custom PSU and because there are no secondary regulators that increases efficiency by several %.

to be clear the controller looks at the oem psu and reads its name model number.

so if your replacement psu has a different model number the controller says fuck you I want model 1 and you gave me model 1a

I had this happen with whatsminer gear. the psu died they shipped me an upgraded psu

P11 vs p10 and the controller needed new firmware to read the new psu.

Wow! It means if your PSU is dead , you must ask directly the ASIC compagnies for a spare or upgraded PSU according to your miner?
If it yes how resellers deal with it in this case ?

[NotFuzzyWarm]

Wow! It means if your PSU is dead , you must ask directly the ASIC compagnies for a spare or upgraded PSU according to your miner?

Yes.

If it yes how resellers deal with it in this case ?

Unless they are a factory authorized distributor - they don't. It is up to you to deal with the OEM. If they *are* a factory authorized distributor they usually will help you as long as the miner is fairly recent model. If it is more than a couple years old you may be screwed because not enough PSU's (and other parts) are built for use as replacements/spares.

Any reseller (someone who is not an authorized distributor) will most likely ignore your requests for spare parts.

[philipma1957]

Wow! It means if your PSU is dead , you must ask directly the ASIC compagnies for a spare or upgraded PSU according to your miner?

Yes.

If it yes how resellers deal with it in this case ?

Unless they are a factory authorized distributor - they don't. It is up to you to deal with the OEM. If they *are* a factory authorized distributor they usually will help you as long as the miner is fairly recent model. If it is more than a couple years old you may be screwed because not enough PSU's (and other parts) are built for use as replacements/spares.

Any reseller (someone who is not an authorized distributor) will most likely ignore your requests for spare parts.

For mining it is an issue.

I now make sure I buy two extra psus when I order gear.

When my partners and I purchased 17 S17s we purchased 2 spare psus.

It is a must.

[mikeywith]

Wow! It means if your PSU is dead , you must ask directly the ASIC compagnies for a spare or upgraded PSU according to your miner?
If it yes how resellers deal with it in this case ?

I think there is a misunderstanding here, the control board reads the general model of the PSU not something like a special serial number, in other words, you can use any PSU from a different miner as long as they are the same exact model, so for resellers, they have APW9+ for example, it will work on all miners that have that PSU model, the control board will real APW9+, check the voltage and some other parameters and it will work just fine.

The problem is, it's hard to source these PSUs in the first place.

[philipma1957]

Wow! It means if your PSU is dead , you must ask directly the ASIC compagnies for a spare or upgraded PSU according to your miner?
If it yes how resellers deal with it in this case ?

I think there is a misunderstanding here, the control board reads the general model of the PSU not something like a special serial number, in other words, you can use any PSU from a different miner as long as they are the same exact model, so for resellers, they have APW9+ for example, it will work on all miners that have that PSU model, the control board will real APW9+, check the voltage and some other parameters and it will work just fine.

The problem is, it's hard to source these PSUs in the first place.

I ordered a 13000 usd L7+ and it is due nov 1-30.

I am already looking for a spare psu.