The 1 TB version i built comes to ~$300 with a 750 ti, so you could get 250 h/s. And these are all retail component costs. Perhaps someday I'd be able to get scale prices somehow. Proper cooling has proven to be a pain - its difficult to find high quality small form factor fans - fans that could last 5 years of constant runtime. And then the question of how loud the fans can be.
The best solution for a 10 year low- or no-maintenance device is to go completely fanless. Forget the GPU unless you can find something decent that is fanless and can be mounted in a fanless chassis (which requires very low thermal output) and instead use a high efficiency CPU with good hash rate like the one we talked about on IRC (hash rate is roughly 120 for 15 watts, possibly less) with a brick PSU. It might require maintenance if the HD dies, but that's about it. Switching to SSD would reduce that. Even with with HD you can't do it $300 though. Not quite yet, but maybe next year.
Unfortunately what kills the price here is that the really cheap CPUs (Celeron, Atom, etc.) can't mine XMR well, but many of them can mine AEON. If you accept a much lower hash rate and efficiency you can still do it, and probably come in below $300 for the whole system.
Indeed, fanless would be the way to go, but yeah those devices we chatted about on irc really provide minimal hash for the buck IMO re: xmr. The 750 tis only pull 33 watts for 250 h/s, and the 750 (1 gb version) even less so for 200 h/s.
That's the same or likely better (since you also have to add the rest of the system overhead for the GPU system) efficiency for the CPU without the need for fans and a second device (size, assembly effort, etc). It is half the total hash rate, but that isn't really huge difference in terms of making a contribution to the network with a low-maint, cheap-to-operate device. Personally I'd rather have something that sits there completely silent for 10 years with zero attention from me than twice the hash rate. If I want more hash I can buy two. But I agree that is a value judgement.
Still it is hard to build that for an attractive price point <$300, so kind of irrelevant right now.
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as it stands, i might be able to get away with fanless. I'll have to run tests once its enclosed.
I doubt you can get 33 W GPU, CPU, HD, etc in a box with no fan. I don't even know whether the GPU can run fanless on its own. If I search for fanless 750-ti all I see are water cooled things (EDIT: I found some with heat pipes and massive heat sinks, but you still have to remove the heat from the box). Though maybe the low power usage of cryptonight mining means a custom built low-efficiency cooling solution could work. I still doubt you will get it in a box. The best you can likely achieve is a well designed box with one quality, relatively expensive, fan (which might last several years) that draws air across multiple devices for cooling. Even that would be a nice design accomplishment.
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that and those devices are already built
I think you can get some high efficiency CPUs that are on raw boards or possibly even socketed where you can design and build your own box. When I've looked for that I've generally found them even more expensive though, so I disregarded it.
), indeed, there is no difference between drive types.
