So...I finally got my December batch Terraminer IV today-the original December $14400 batch version. I was super excited so I decided to take some photos, you can click to the imgur album here:
http://imgur.com/a/dbtmd or just look below.
Now, setup was a little bit tricky. First off, there were no instructions in the box on what to do, so I headed off to Cointerra's website where they promised they would publish directions before shipping the first unit, except there were no instructions there either. No matter, I looked in the forums and plugged in my networking cable, and plugged in power to both PSUs and the fans powered on. Except the Terraminer was nowhere to be found in my router's DHCP tables.
As it turns out (after a call to Cointerra to figure out what was wrong) you should actually turn on your Terraminer by doing everything in the following order:
1) Plug in the ethernet cable to a working router that you have administrative access to.
2) Plug in the power cables to the two PSUs, you *must* plug in the power to BOTH cables within 3 seconds of each other.
3) You should now see the orange LED power on on the front of the unit where it says CTR1-this LED shut off for me after a few seconds so you have to be looking at it right after you plug in the PSUs.
4) Now wait about 1 minute and check your DHCP tables, if the unit powers on correctly you should see the unit in there.
5) Open your browser and type in the IP address that you saw to get to the control panel for the Terraminer.
6) Log into it-the username defaults to admin and there is no default password apparently.
From there it's actually pretty self explanatory, you click the configure button and put in the pool URL and pool worker name/pass then the unit will connect to the pool and start mining. When it does this the miner lights will start blinking away and the unit will become insanely loud-this thing has six high speed Delta fans blasting away...unfortunately as you can tell from my pics it's not in a server room for me.
As for performance? Well, the control panel seems to say it's running at 1.5Thash, but unlike my BFL hardware where what's reported in CGMiner is more or less what the pool sees I can't get BTCGuild to see any more than 1.3Thash and it seems to fluctuate between 1.2 and 1.3Thash...this is severely disappointing right now and I've been playing around with pool settings to see if I can get any better performance but I'm basically mining 2/3rds of what I was expecting and obviously it's over 2 months late. All things considered for $14400 I could have had two Jupiters mining away at almost the same hashrate for 5 months now...even though they're sending another unit in March to try and make up for the delays the much lower hashrate is actually now the major issue-I'm honestly not sure how any of the later batches will ROI if they don't actually ship the full 2 terahashes. I have no idea how their control panel is showing such optimistic hashrates either. Overall I have to say that this whole experience has made me really hesitant about doing any sort of pre-orders ever again, I ended up paying about $11 per gigahash-yes this price will go down once they actually deliver a March unit but right now I have no idea when that will actually get here or even how much mining power it will have so if it ends up being 2.6Thash being delivered half in February and half in April for $14400...
Edit: After some fiddling around (took cgminer down temporarily, changed the power setting around, restarted everything via SSH, etc.) I'm seeing 1.7Thash locally now instead of 1.5Thash and I've switched to Eligius...the hashrate is still climbing up at the moment so we'll see where it settles-maybe Eligius works better than BTCGuild with Terraminers? I know Cointerra was testing on Eligius so maybe this is the only pool that really deals well with these. We'll see soon enough I guess.