Posts Tagged ‘Bitmain Antminer E3’

How to Update the Firmware on Problematic Bitmain Antminer E3 Miners

23, Apr 2020

Last month Bitmain has released an updated firmware for their Antminer E3 miners to extend their life for mining Ethereum Classic (ETC) and Ethereum (ETH) with the approach of 4GB DAG sizes, however a lot of users had issues updating all devices successfully. Errors preventing the proper update to the fixed firmware such as:

413 - Request Entity Too Large

or

mount: mounting ubi1:rootfs on /mnt/config failed: Invalid argument mkdir: can't create directory '/mnt/config/home/usr_config': No such file or directory cp: can't create '/mnt/config/home/usr_config/': No such file or directory umount: can't umount /mnt/config: Invalid argument mount: mounting ubi1:rootfs on /mnt/upgrade failed: No such file or directory runme.sh: cd: line 122: can't cd to /mnt/upgrade/upgrade umount: can't umount /mnt/upgrade: No such file or directory

The easiest method we have found that works 100% in a couple of Antminer E3 miners that we had issues updating remotely via the web interface of the devices is to flash the SD card recovery firmware and then update normally with the latest fixed firmware. The only drawback for this method is that you need to have physical access to the E3 miners as you cannot do the SD card recovery procedure remotely unfortunately.

Here is a quick guide on how to updated problematic E3 miners:
– Download the E3-SD-20180806-pool.zip SD card recovery firmware file from Bitman
– Have a handy 4-8GB micro-SD flash card (larger capacity should work but is not needed), format it with FAT32 file system and extract the contents of the E3-SD-20180806-pool.zip archive on the card
– Insert the SD card into the slot at the back of the Antminer E3 device (it should be powered off)
– You need to open the control board of the miner and switch the position of the jumper labeled JP4 and then power on the device
– Wait for about a minute until you see the red and green LEDs on the control board start blinking together
– Power down the Antminer S3, revert the position of the JP4 jumper to its original place, remove the SD card and insert the control board back on its place
– Power on the miner, wait for it to boot (it will have the default configuration settings) and go to Upgrade to flash the latest fixed firmware
– You can download the latest fixed firmware for Antminer E3 here – E3_V540_0327.tar.gz
– Wait for the flash procedure to finish and the miner to reboot, set your mining pool and wallet address in the configuration settings and you should be ready to mine normally once again until the DAG size for ETH and ETC reaches very close to 4GB that is…

Bitmain Antminer E3 Firmware Update to Extend the Miner’s Life

30, Mar 2020

It seems that Bitmain has taken seriously the issue with their Antminer E3 ASIC miners intended for Ethash stopping to mine Ethereum Classic (ETC) recently and their upcoming inability to mine ETH as well in the very near future. To ensure Bitmain can provide efficient mining equipment for the Ethereum community, it has launched a new firmware to support the Antminer E3. This new firmware has apparently been designed to allow miners to continue using the Antminer E3, even after March 2020. This new firmware addresses the prior issue of the growth of directed acyclic graph (DAG) files, which limited the capability of the Antminer E3s for mining ETH or ETC. This new firmware will expand the usage of Double Date Rate (DDR) Memory, as more space is needed to process DAG files according to the company.

So, how long will the Antminer E3 last with the new firmware? The new firmware has been designed to better support the Antminer E3, and so Bitmain is confident that miners can continue using the hardware past April 2020. With the new firmware update, the final approximate block height of the Antminer E3 is 11,400,000, so according to calculations, mining can continue until October of 2020. ETC mining will stop again earlier than ETH due to the current DAG Epoch for Ethereum Classic being ahead with about 10 Epochs. Regardless, the new DAG size that the E3 miners would be able to handle seems to be increased to 3.97 GB based on the block number data released by Bitmain. So if you have Bitmain Antminer E3 miners you should make sure to update them with the latest firmware released to be able to extend their life to the maximum possible.

– To download the latest Bitmain Antminer E3 Firmware Update extending Ethash mining support…

Are Bitmain’s Antminer E3 Ethash ASIC Miners Becoming Obsolete

24, Feb 2020

It seems that the life of the Antminer E3 ASIC miners from Bitmain is nearing its end with the Ethash miner apparently becoming useless for Ethereum Classic (ETC) mining and soon for Ethereum (ETH) as well, or at least we are getting such reports form users being unable to mine properly ETC these devices anymore. The reason for that is the fact that they do work like video cards with 4GB video memory and as these become obsolete due to large DAG size (even though not yet 4GB in size), so will do the E3 ASIC miners. ETC is the first to drop from the E3 coins to mine as it is ahead with about 10 epochs from ETH (328 for ETC, 318 for ETH), so Ethereum has less than two months left before reaching the same place as ETC did. Of course there are a number of other smaller Ethash-based projects that are far behind with their DAG epochs, so the E3 miners will still be able to be mined with the ASIC miners. The problem is what will happen with profitability with a big influx of hashrate coming from large E3 mining operations, so most likely very soon it will be time to retire the miners.

It is interesting to note that Ethereum (ETH) does have a plan to do another fork and switch to the ProgPow proof of work mining algorithm (GPU-only mining) at some point this year, and the time could coincide with the “E3 miner death” for ETH mining or not. Nevertheless now is definitely not the best time to be buying Antminer E3 even if somebody is offering the hardware at a really low prices as in less than two months it might become pretty useless. If you do have E3 ASIC miners make sure you maximize their use for the remaining time that you should be able to mine ETH with them and start planning what to do with them afterwards.


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