I just wanted to chime in on this thread to maybe clarify a few things about the B1&B2 A4 miner issues. Also to possibly help clear up some of the confusion regarding Innosilicon and their warranty support. Some of that confusion was possibly created by me so I thought it would be good if I tried to help clear up some of issues that have been brought up here.
First off Batch 1 and Batch 2 miners do in fact have performance issues. Namely the inability to run stably on multicoin mining pools. The stability issues calm down greatly on a single coin pool. Inno has sent a jig that can flash the B1 and B2 miners to the US and it is making it's rounds to customers who have contacted Innosilicon and requested it. The good news is that there were NOT a huge number of these B1 and B2 miners sold through Innosilicon. So it should not be a difficult task to get the jig sent around to the miners that need it.
Initially I was trying to coordinate this activity to send the jig around to the owners of the miners, and it was my suggestion to have miners place a deposit and use a drawing to determine who gets the jig first. However after the jig arrived it became a huge concern that it would be damaged in the shipping and I was afraid we would have to pay to replace that jig which is quite expensive. So that was all my "brilliant idea" which frankly SUCKED. We then came up with the idea to send the jig to one person who would be willing to flash all the miners. However Inno was more concerned with your miners being damaged than the jig. So Innosilicon decided that it would be better to mail the jig and they would replace it if it was damaged. They are also picking up the cost of the shipment of the jig to the owners who need it.
To put things in context. The fact that these miners shipped in October(to pre-order customers), Inno has done several software releases, and finally narrowed down the issue to a firmware problem that required a flash and a special jig to do the flash in the space of less than 2 months. I cannot say that Innosilicon has not gone above and beyond to try and fix this issue. The firmware flash does in fact fix the B1 and B2 miners stability issues. They now run fine on multi-coin pools as well as single coin pools without the restarts and dropped hash board issues.
So I think it is an unfair statement to say Inno has not backed their product. They are doing what is necessary to fix those customers affected by the early miners. Anyone buying an A4 today from Inno will be getting a B3 or newer miner which does not have any of those issues.
I can also say that having owned the A4's that they appear to be solidly built miners and I can also say I have not heard anyone report having a miner die, bad boards, or anything of the sort. I heard of one fan die. That is it. I think that says a lot and you wouldn't be able to say that about anything that Bitmain ships as of late.
So if you buy an A4 I think you will get a solid and reliable miner. These things are loud. You won't be putting one of these in your house unless it is a basement, garage, or exterior building where you can isolate the noise. I will also add that the advertised hash rate is not what I saw with my A4's. This may very well be something that can be tuned, tweaked, and enhanced to increase the performance. My average was somewhere around 250mhs with my A4's. Your mileage may vary. Some say they are getting very close to the rated performance. I am pretty unlucky so maybe they are right. I can only speak to my own experience. Inno has stated they intend to open source the software. So our community may very well be able to get the performance and enhancements we all would like to see in the GUI and the capabilities of the software.
I do believe Inno will back this product. However it is rightly stated that there is now competition in this space, and it has been confirmed by multiple sources including Bitmain. You can see the "placeholder" link from the Bitmain site here:
https://shop.bitmain.com/productDetail.htm?pid=00020161229040715306ygMSJQLh06C0It appears they already sold out of their L3 batch 1 miners. They were only released in China at this point. So Inno's statement about 3 months of no competition may very well be true. It is too early to say and Inno wouldn't know the plans of their competitors so how could they know for sure? At this point rumors have it that the L3's have sold out, but you can still find a few vendors who have them for some pretty high markups.
So if you are looking for a Scrypt/Litecoin miner that is reliable and is backed by the company then the A4 is a good choice. I can say that if you have been following any of the current Bitmain products you know they have a LOT of hardware issues. Their warranty is really bad. And honestly the L3 may be as bad as the S9 and R4's for reliability. We honestly don't know what the L3 will be like. Most people don't factor in those extra costs when looking at the Bitmain products. If you have to ship units back to China, pay for repairs if the deem it was your fault, add up the down time. Well you start to look at about a 20% increase in cost over your initial cost of the miner itself. So tack that onto the price tag with Bitmain products in order to guesstimate the true cost. Even then you are going to be praying to the miner gods that you don't have any more issues come up.
So cut Inno some slack here. They will have to respond to Bitmain's entry into the market. Only time will tell what that response will be. If you want a miner now, then Inno is still the only game in town.
