Question on this...

What kind of sustained bandwidth does a normal mining operation consume? I have a 30MB up/down pipe and was wondering what I should allocate. I can build a DMZ for my local P2Pool server to run on, and set the limits on bandwidth. Would 2MB be enough? More?

That's exactly what I'm tuning for right now. I'm going to let it eat tonight and play with it tomorrow when I have more time to dedicate to it.

Got the SP20s today. NICE units.

I'm going to give them a few hours to burn in before I start looking at the numbers.

I see why people say that 1.7TH isn't realistic. Mine are steady at 1.55 after an hour with the standard settings. I'll play with those a little later in the day when I have time.

I'll say this though, the QUALITY of the boxes is superior in every way.

Nope. I'm pegging it with 6.5TH...no connection errors. Pretty low latency actually.

Great looking setup. I'm hoping to have something similar soon.

Changed my freq to 387.5 and I've been cooking at 1.22~ for about an hour now. Not too shabby! Got to 8,731,648 shares on the last shift. That's about 200K more than I had in the last shifts.

I'm going to wait until we get the power situated a little better before I go any higher.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/28538855/tue-mining.png

All of that would fit in 1 42U rack. Why wouldn't you rack-mount rack-mountable servers?

Sadly, a lot of people don't get that joke.

I litereally "lol'd"

I've been up and running with the 5 S5s since about 2:30pm today. The SP20s won't arrive for a few days though. I still need to have power re-wired in that room for 208v, so right now, I have the S5s in the data room that we still have servers in. So far, I've been mining at a sustained 5.85 TH/s for the last 5.5h. They've mined 0.00387851 according to the BTC Guild dashboard. Although, the shifts aren't closed, so I'm expecting that to go up. I'll wait a day before I work out the actual calculations.

I'm hoping to have power run to the room I want everything running out of by Thursday. Then I'll run them both for a week and see what the results look like.

I DO like that the S5s are performing at/above the reported specs. Setup was a breeze. I expect the same from the SP20s. I've been looking at the Github repo for the Spondoolies software, and I like that it's seemingly more open. We'll likely build out a lot of custom dashboards and administration portals, so that's important to me too.

The quality on the S5 was a little suspect. One of the heatsinks was caved in...and it was clearly installed that way. The case around it was fine. Little things like that piss me off.

And....we're in business with the S5s.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/28538855/mining_1.png

Spent quite a bit of time talking to Gadi at Spondoolies Tech this AM. I should have those machines by Wednesday.

Likely China.

Ha. We already have about 30 people in the office, so that's already covered.

Another observation: Most people seem to just be using wire racks. I'm used to rack-mounted gear, so this is a bit of a change.

I have a forum that has been running on SMF since before it was called SMF. (PutterTalk.com) I can certainly appreciate that error page!  Great job getting search re-enabled.

Already have my waybills, but I appreciate the offer.


I do like simplifying things. But I want a good handle on all the unit economics before I start making things easy on myself. That's a great point though.

With my company, we used to break everything down to the cost per transaction. After a few years we realized that logic was flawed as our volume went up exponentially but other costs went up as well. Once we started concentrating on the unit economics of particular business lines, that's when we started making more money.

This is MUCH simpler math. There are only a few factors involved, which is wonderful. There also appears to be much more volatility. That part is also very different.

I've been researching the hell out of this. There seem to be a lot of opinions, based on the costs. Speculation on the market is an interesting factor to add in. This means I'm going to have to form my own opinion from experience ultimately. That's why we're starting with a 11 TH/s setup.

That's an excellent point.

I'm going to look at the PSUs that I already have, but more efficient choices could make a big difference at this scale. A 100w difference per PSU would add up to 12,000W diff at the end.

Here's a breakdown of what I've spent so far. This will become useful in a week or two after I've let everything run for a bit and then I can compare apples to apples.

=============================================
Antminer S5 build:  

5 Antminer S5 @ $449.99ea = $2,249.95     (I bought these on Amazon. I know I can get it cheaper, but this was state-side and easy.)
5 Corsair CX750M power supplies @ $79.99ea = $399.95
Total: $2,649.90

Expected Specs:

6,500 GH/s @ 590W (Edited)
=============================================

=============================================
SDTech SP20 build:

3 Spondoolies Tech SP20 = $1,195.00
3 EVGA SuperNOVA 1300G2 @ $169ea = $507.00
Total: $1,702

Expected Specs:

4,800 GH/s @ 1,200W (Edited)
=============================================

For arguments sake, let's assume power costs $0.05 kwh.

I'm going to factor all this together and see where it lands. (I'm still trying to get my excel sheet to work correctly.) Right now it looks kinda like a toss-up.

Korbman: What an incredibly informative and thoughtful post. I appreciate it! I'd already started factoring quite a bit of that, so another "set of eyes" on this is appreciated.

I'd come up with similar numbers built using an excel sheet that I've been hobbling together over the last week. I'm used to dealing with headcounts, salaries, project scopes and timelines....getting down and dirty with the most basic of economics is a refreshing change.

That's why I wanted to start with a small operation...made up of two different kinds of gear. See which is easier to setup and maintain and take actual temperature readings to see what we need to do about cooling.

My friend (referenced earlier, and in a video link that someone else posted) just finished a 500TH deployment with the S5, and the older 150TH they decommissioned was only a year old. So I need to factor in a yearly hardware swap. That being said, I'm likely to be in a better position with a particular manufacturer if I am already buying/using their gear.

Just checked the order status, and it looks like I'll have my S5s on Monday...no shipping info for the SP20s yet.

Rent is already covered...and we have plenty of space available for this. I've got plenty of people...utilities are way less than average and this kind of power load is already budgeted.


That's precisely what I did last week. I bought at $217 with the plan to use that for the farm we're looking at building. If we don't buy a thing, I can sell the BTC and make $. If we end up buying gear, we're buying at a better price.


Yeah, I tend to "go big" quickly. I actually ended up buying 1 nano farm. I had it in my head to buy 5...but we bought 3 because the TH/s of the 3-node SP20 was roughly the same as the 5 S5s. So I'll be comparing 3 SP20s to 5 S5s.

I see the thread got moved...hope I didn't do something wrong.

Thanks for the opinions and help guys. It really does help and keep things in perspective for me.

Oh, I don't know...thinking about 120 of them or so?


Looking at the Hashcoins Uranus is interesting...gotta run the numbers on that one too.

$.09 is about 2X what I'm paying in OH. I feel for you guys.