Quote from: mikeywith on April 15, 2025, 10:06:34 PM

Quote from: mindrust on February 27, 2025, 10:14:19 AM

Customers need to have a decent customer service/support if something goes wrong with the hardware and I don’t think there are many reputable brands around that provide it. Canaan used to be quite big I don’t know if they are still in business but Bitmain is pretty much the golden standard of crypto miners.

So instead of choosing a brand you never heard of before, OP you should go with a miner from Bitmain’s lineup imo. (Unless you are feeling adventurous)

MicroBT builds the most robust mining gear. Bitmain is slightly above mediocre, and Canaan falls below that. The only area where Bitmain beats MicroBT is in efficiency and availability -- thanks to their massive production volume, you'll almost always find that the same generation of Antminer is slightly more efficient than a Whatsminer. Aside from that, MicroBT outperforms Bitmain in every other aspect, including customer service.

The thing about Antminers is that they're just too popular. Most people have a herd mentality- they don’t want to try "new" things. But the moment they get their hands on Whatsminers and start comparing reliability and build quality, they’re unlikely to go back to Antminers again.

In case you didn't know, it’s not uncommon to see a high DOA (dead on arrival) rate with brand-new Antminers. I know people who've reported up to 8% DOA on batches of 1,000+ S19 units. Compare that to 0–1% DOA for the same quantity of Whatsminer M30+ units. Want to know what’s even more surprising? Nearly 0% of Whatsminers fail within the first year, while Bitmain has almost double the DOA rate. To their credit, Bitmain has improved since the 17 serie -- when failure rates reached up to 40% within the first 6 months—but still, nothing comes close to Whatsminers in terms of durability.

Speaking from personal experience -- having owned, sold, and managed thousands of both brand --I can say without a shadow of a doubt that the numbers most people report are probably conservative. Antminers are actually worse. 😉 I've had hundreds of Whatsminers running for over two years with nearly zero failures at the hashboard level. Yes, the fans die too often (since only two are doing all the work), but trust me: I had an M21s running with just one fan in a terrible environment, and it didn't even reboot, it kept hashing like a champ. Meanwhile, I've had to collect heatsinks from S17s after blasting them with a $10 blower. 😅

That said, Whatsminers do have two notable drawbacks (and no, fan replacement isn't one of them since they're cheap, easy to swap, and don't fail much sooner than Antminer fans). The first issue is the PSU design. The C19 connector is overkill. Most miners don't have the infrastructure to supply 3–3.5kW on a single cord or socket. That was a poor design choice by the Whatsminer engineering team, and it's kept them out of a lot of markets.

The second issue is their slow boot time. While Antminers typically boot and tune in 1–5 minutes, older generations of Whatsminers can take up to 45 minutes. Thankfully, this has improved significantly in newer generations and firmware updates. They now boot in about 5–15 minutes, with a median around 10 minutes based on a sample of a few hundred units I last tested.

Other than that, if you want a machine that runs trouble-free for five times as long as your average Antminer, it's Whatsminer -- every single day of the year.

I will tell you a little bit of practice. It does not matter what is better, MicroBT, Bitmain or something else. For a miner, a good warranty and audition periods are important. Some ASICs are repaired in a month, other ASICs in 3 months, because they are sent to the factory. In mining, you need to take these points into account.