The Gridseed DualMiner is able to mine both SHA256 and scrypt at the same time, or either one by itself. When it mines scrypt only the power draw is minimal, SHA256 mining causes the power usage to go up considerably. Because of this, most people (including myself) are only interested in the scrypt mining ability of the Gridseed. I picked up a pair of them to test out. The Gridseed needs to be controlled by something, and the controllers built for them leave a lot to be desired. I built the Mini Miner to be a low-power GPU based scrypt mining rig and using the Mini Miner to control the Gridseeds was the perfect solution, my total cost per Kh/s goes down and Kh/s per watt goes up. At only 9 watts per Gridseed I can add quite a lot of them and still have a low-power scrypt mining rig. If you don't have a Linux mining rig you can use a Raspberry Pi or a Windows computer.
Power Supply
If your Gridseed doesn't come with a power supply you will need to purchase one. You can get either standalone power supplies or PCIE to barrel adapters to power them from a computer power supply. I power mine with individual 12V/5A adapters bought on eBay for under $10 each and they have been working well.
| eBay search: | 12v "5.5" "2.5" 5a |
Software
When a Gridseed Miner is plugged into a Gridseed controller the settings for the controller are accessed by its IP address in your web browser and no mining software is required. However, the Gridseed controllers were buggy, unpopular and are hard to find.
The preferred way to use a Gridseed is to plug it into a computer and run standard mining software. The first utility to run a Gridseed was a modified version of CPUMiner. It works, but if you have multiple Gridseed units you must run a seperate instance CPUMiner for every Gridseed. A modified version of CGMiner is also available, this lets you run and see the details for multiple Gridseed miners together. Here are instructions for running a Gridseed with CGMiner.
Conclusion
I am quite happy with the Gridseed miners, the cost per Kh/s and Kh/s per watt are better than a GPU system. ASICs are definetly the future of scrypt mining.