Which Old Miners did You Like?

[Boakse]

Well, Bitcoin mining has gone quite fast...

In Hashrate and Difficulty in the past years...


Remember the older miners??

Which ones did you really like back then and why??
And which one did -really- suck??


ex.

Asicminer
Butterfly Labs
Avalon
KNC
Terracoin
Coincraft
Bitmain \ Antminer
Spondoolies
Bitfury
and more...

[philipma1957]

I think;

The BEST Quality miners ever made = Spondoolies...

Bitmain s3
spondoolies sp10
avalon a4

[Boakse]

I think;

The BEST Quality miners ever made = Spondoolies...

Bitmain s3
spondoolies sp10
avalon a4

I just removed my previous reaction, to not interfere with my personal opinion...

However, the SP10 was a great miner !!  


I remember we had 8 of these and some SP35 and we felt being king

[sidehack]

I actually didn't like Spondoolies that much. The SP10 was a 1U rack machine cooled by 1U fans which spun incredibly fast to move any air at all and therefore made pretty terrible noise. Their 2U equipment were still about three feet long, which meant by the time intake air got to the heatsinks at the back it was already oven-temperature and didn't cool effectively. Heatsinks were inadequate.

I started losing respect for Bitmain when they produced a new S7 model with a regulated string but firmware-locked the voltage. It had a lower parts cost than the first version (therefore higher profit margin) and significantly worse efficiency but they did their darndest to convince people it was better. The S7 is also when they went all-in on epoxied chipsinks, cheap and quick but unreliable and hard to maintain or repair. They also kept making their air paths longer and longer even as they doubled the amount of heat in the box, causing the same problems as Spondoolies. It took them too many years to figure out that was dumb.

Who I really like is those GekkoScience guys. Their schedule is pretty sloppy but the gear itself is decent 😁

[hZti]

Antminer S9 is a pretty awesome machine. I always wanted to get a hydro version, but prices are to crazy.

[DaveF]

I miss the S3 / R4 quiet Bitmain miners.

And, although it pains me to say this, I made a lot of BTC getting 2nd (and 3rd) hand Butterfly Labs stuff.
For a while there so many people overpaid for it, got it delivered late and were so disgusted with it all that you could pick them up lightly used for 1/10 the price that they paid.
At that point even with them being 1 or 2 gens out and not efficient, you could mine on razor thin margins at the time and still come out ahead since the $1500 miner cost you $175 delivered to your door.
And when you were really done with them you could still sell them for a few bucks.

The old innosilicon were also workhorses, not the best efficiency but they just kept on mining and mining with no issues. At least for me.

-Dave

[sidehack]

For a while I was pulling in 0.5BTC/week with Antminer S1. I had started pretty much with nothing and reinvested or made side money doing repairs and built up a 2TH mine, then switched from "turn ridiculous profits" to collecting interesting gear and traded most of them out for an S2, an A1 Dragon and other cool stuff. The Dragon outlasted everything else, and I bought a second one later not just for the collection but as a heater for the office. It actually had a failed board, which was really weird. I think I pulled the PSU from it for a computer that was still in use about a year ago; pretty solid.

The S4 was a pretty decent machine, tidy and not a lot of noise. S4+ however, went backward in efficiency and reliability. I was consulting for a guy and steered him away from those machines, but his MO was to always do the opposite of what I recommended so he went all in and had a 20% failure rate within the first few weeks. Our working relationship did not last long.
But when I think about cased miners, I pretty much always think about the S4 first because its dimensions and design was just really good.

[Boakse]

Yeah, Antminer S1...

there was I time, I thought ; this is a lot of power for a miner! 360 watt!
Check where we are know


I would love to see a silent (half) S19 pro Style miner ala R4 format and relative silent,
however I think for Bitmain this is a passed station.

[NotFuzzyWarm]

Canaan's Avalon 841's. Built like a tank and near indestructible, very easy to tweak the settings for everything covered by the cgminer API (that Kano wrote btw). I still have 10 of them. Most are long retired but I still run 2 as very quiet wintertime space heaters pulling 750-800w yet still delivering ~9TH each.

[Skot]

The Spartan 6 FPGA dev boards they had in the CS150 lab! Possibly the last open source miner? https://github.com/progranism/Open-Source-FPGA-Bitcoin-Miner

We were trying to get enough BTC to get a pizza, but then the 50BTC pool got hacked before I could get a payout.

[willi9974]

I like old and new ASIC USB Miner to mine solo on ck solo pool for a chance of an block to play bitcoin lottery
One user has done that in our forum with a USB miner, amazing luck !!!

or use an old low speed hack S9 miner for house heating or homeoffice heating...

Best regards
Willi

[BitMaxz]

I like the old USB stick miner before I think block erupter and Spoondoolies sp10 and s9.

But if the CPU is included in your list then PC is the best when Bitcoin mining before is allowed to mine through PC and GPU.

[paid2]

I still use my Antminer R4s, I love them. The PSU clearly makes more noise than the ASIC itself, and if you put a small fan on the front panel at the 6Pins connectors to extract the air, they are still very stable for their age. I also have quite a few old S9s and a few S9ks often with some hashboards removed, I pay almost nothing for electricity so I keep using whatever I have or find cheap in terms of $ per Th/s.

My favorites are the gekkoscience Newpac / R606 / R909, I find them perfect to mine solo, never any real problems with them, always fun to follow the shares submitted from time to time. I only had one problem with an overheating R606 once, but easy to fix.

I like to check old equipment on this website : https://bitcoinminingmuseum.com/gallery.html
I would love to play a little bit with some S1 or S2

[HagssFIN]

Choosing favorites from all generations and manufacturers and models which I've tried... Oof that is a tough question!

I'm gonna reply with my current gut feeling and say Antminer S2 and Avalon 841!

I liked the big 19" server case and big cards in S2, it cooled very effectively with not much fan speed/noise. The size of it is also an important memory, I really felt being in the mining biz when I had such a big box in the shelf!

A841 I like it for all the tweaking I've done with it and its tank like structure.

Which miners sucked the most you might ask... i'm gonna say that Ebang Ebit gear was very rubbish and they had poor customer service.

[philipma1957]

Choosing favorites from all generations and manufacturers and models which I've tried... Oof that is a tough question!

I'm gonna reply with my current gut feeling and say Antminer S2 and Avalon 841!

I liked the big 19" server case and big cards in S2, it cooled very effectively with not much fan speed/noise. The size of it is also an important memory, I really felt being in the mining biz when I had such a big box in the shelf!

A841 I like it for all the tweaking I've done with it and its tank like structure.

A841 were nice good downclock make them quiet.

Spondollies sp10 good down clock and quiet.

[mikeywith]

Canaan's Avalon 841's. Built like a tank and near indestructible, very easy to tweak the settings for everything covered by the cgminer API (that Kano wrote btw). I still have 10 of them. Most are long retired but I still run 2 as very quiet wintertime space heaters pulling 750-800w yet still delivering ~9TH each.

I was pretty much unlucky with the Avalon 841's, I never liked them, they were never stable and kept failing all the time, but to be fair, I have to make clear that I bought those gears used, so it's very likely the previous owner/s have abused them pretty much, however, I bought hundreds of Antminer S9s which were also used (probably for the same duration) and they performed better.