you cant really compare bitfury and antminer, when antminer uses double the power.... the market sets the price..... so as long as people are paying what bitfury asks.... then the price is fair.... when people are no longer buying..... the price should drop..... basic economics..... if you are selling something at $400, and people buy it.... why would you drop the price?
At 15 cents per kilowatt hour, the Antminer only uses ~$20 more in electricity per month at ~200 GH/s, so clearly BitFury gear should not command such a large price premium.
Exactly, 20 a month isn't anything to get the miner now and cheap! I bought 1 antminer at 4.25 four at 2.25 I will get crazy with it at 1.45, And
the antminer is standalone, no backplane no rasberry pi no sd card. Just plug it in and program it, then leave it alone. I would think that when bitmain was doing slow releases with group buy and auction, bitfury had more business because of shorter supply and they were the same price per gh, I would assume now they are going to have to get more price competitive to keep in the game.
+1. Even if the bitfury was price-competitive (factoring in a small premium for lower power draw), it is not a plug-and-play system. it needs tweaking, has trouble standing upright, and seems to obliterate SD cards just a little too frequently. I had a power outtage for 1hour, and all the antminers came back online without a problem. the bitfury sat for almost a day because it fried the SD card (second card it has totally trashed, not just corrupted) and I had to go and purchase 2 new cards for it.
This might be a little bit more complex to setup, but have you looked into booting the Raspberry PI off of a NFS network share (network booting essentially). This way constant writes or power outages will not kill your sd cards.
that might not be a bad idea, but it would still require an SD card in the rPi, which seems to be the weak point in any case. plus, I use a laptop so probably not a solution if i am jumping around the house and/or leaving the network at times.
Once its up and running its fine - its just the power changes that kill the cards so I leave the system to do its thing undisturbed
The issue with the rpi and sd card corruption/murder lies in using the CARD as the OS storage space and chainminer is constantly reading/writing to that space in the form of logs, etc .
The rpi requires an sd card to boot.
But if properly configured with your favorite bootloader, u-boot for example, this can point to anywhere to load the OS: SD card, USB drive (flash or hdd), NFS(would most difficult to configure), etc.
Then after bootloader passes off execution to the kernel, if it's not located on the sd card, voila, sd card comm is no longer needed and corruption should not be an issue.
I can akin it to telling the windows loader on an x86 system:
Default: hdd0, load windows 7
Opt 1: hdd1, load windows xp
Opt 2: hdd2, load Linux
YES it can be done. NO, it is not as easy as
sudo dd bs=2m if=raspian.img of=/dev/path/to/sdcard
TL;DR I'll try an come up with a guide for anyone who wishes to try it out. I would do a video on actual bitfury hardware if I had any(waiting on tax return :/). But at least I can demonstrate it on an rPi.
GUIDE TO COME..... soon!
