ASIC Miner Block Erupter's 101

Picture
Here is a sample picture of a USB Bitcoin ASIC Miner Block Erupter.  These are commonly available in many retail outlets.  These USB based devices are -simply- plugged into an USB port on your workstation.  The performance on these is generally in the 336 MH/s to 2.2GH/s range depending on the type you purchase.  With other words while the devices look very similar the performance may differ significantly.
Picture
If you end up purchasing more than a single USB attached ASIC miner you may need to purchase a USB hub.  Here is a sample picture of a USB hub.
Picture
This is an image of a network attached Bitcoin ASIC Miner Erupter by ASICMINER.  The device measuring about 6 x 6 x 6 inches is Ethernet attached to your network and needs virtually no configuration.  It is rated at 30Gh/s but performs up to 38Gh/s in our experience.  Setup of this device is no more than a few minutes.  Since the ASIC miner only supports the "getwork" protocol you will need to set up a proxy to "translate" the traffic into the more accurate stratum format. While this sounds like a complicated process it is not.  The process is not much more difficult than entering a URL/HTML address into a Web Browser.
There are more expensive and more powerful ASIC miners available.  The ones listed above are the more common ones.  Please keep in mind if you end up purchasing an ASIC miners that you can only mine particular coins with them. With a few exceptions the miners listed above are meant for mining SHA-256 coins such as Bit Coin.
If you have any questions please feel free to drop us a message.