I've been mining ETN for a few days now, but wondered what people with more experience would rather have out of a pool with a few hundred miners, but a very low hash rate or a pool with 10k+ miners and a hash rate around 20 times bigger.
I don't know whether to stick with the pool I'm currently in or switch to one with a higher hash rate.
After mining for a few months, I have realized a few things. The size of the pool makes no difference. It just affects the frequency of payment. Big pools find blocks frequently, so you get your small share of the reward frequently but with small pools you get a big chunky reward at once but it may take days or weeks. However, over a significant period of time, you earn the same.
What's more important is how reliable the pool is. Most pools are highly unreliable and often go down as they don't have competent admins to protect against DDOS or high loads. Some of them don't even record your hashrate correctly. So I say stick with the pools having the highest uptime irrespective of how much fee they charge. A difference of 1% fee won't kill you but frequent downtimes definitely will.