There are good reasons not to have an internal PSU, additional expense, more heat to get rid off, and there is no problem convincing customs that it's not a mains power device that requires certification. If you need other cases, have them made and perhaps sell them on eBay as well. All the BFL models except the 500GH/s use external power supplies.
- The cost savings between the slightly smaller case can't be all that significant - I bet that any standard configuration, ordered in bulk is <$50.
- A high quality (gold rated) PSU will generate little additional heat inside the case and is obviously easy enough to design for servers with far larger power requirements.
- Customs is either going to want to open the case and look inside or they aren't. I can't imagine the size of the case nor the amount of free space inside will convince them one way or another.
- yes, the components could be moved to a case, but that takes extra time and money that shouldn't be needed. All Avalon units allow for an internal PSU. Yeah, they got stuck in customs - no I have no idea whether this is part of the reason.
I don't buy those reasons as justification - I still see this as a less efficient way to run 100+ of these units in a large operation. For the small miner (myself included) it's no issue - it's the serious mining operations that won't be as thrilled.
Hey, let's be realistic: it's all about squeezing the revenue, rather than having nice and pretty boxes!
Someone about to run a 100+ unit operation certainly wouldn't give a sh*t about placement of the PSUs, as long as the machines gave him advantage in terms of hashing power/$ and hashing power/kW. These would be the only two qualities that mattered, really. Yeah, of course there are many important things like warranty, return policy, company transparency and its level of expertise in a field, but certainly not PSU placement!
And if there were actually big money involved in Bitcoin (which there isn't yet), we would be turning whole skycrapers into our custom datacenters rather than worrying about how would our units fit. The HFT guys are doing this already (start watching from 10:37 to get my point):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDaFwnOiKVE
Many thanks LightRider for bringing this eye-opening video to bitcointalk:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.415446
