"Minimum difficulty" and its effect on different mining devices

Economics Mining (Proof of Work)
1

In the pool that I contribute to (D7), we have the option of adjusting the minimum difficulty of the blocks that we process on a per-worker basis. When I started out, I was using six 333MH/s Block Erupters and had my worker difficulty set to the recommended value of “1”.

Recently, I expanded my setup to include two BFL Little Singles @ 25GH/s. With my new total hashrate of ~52GH/s, I modified the worker’s minimum difficulty value to 64. That, in itself is pretty straight-forward, however, what I’m unclear on is whether or not doing that adversely affects the six Erupters.

Technically, does each unit work in concert to handle a subsection of the block, and therefore, difficulty is only important to the pool of miners you are running? If that’s not the case, does it follow that to gain the most efficiency out of the different units, that you’d want to run different workers with similar-hashing devices in each one?

Worker.1 – 2x BFL Little Singles @ 32 (or 64 diff)
Worker.2 – 6x ASICMiner BE @ 1 diff
…

Thanks in advance! I’m still trying to wrap my head around the concept of block difficulty on the micro-scale (e.g. personal processing vs. total network)

2

Found this: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficulty

Still experimenting with code to see the effects of all these variables with the devices I have on hand…

8 )

3

Yes, you should have a separate worker for the Block Eruptors, as the difficulty hurdle set by the pool against your single worker being so high will mean there is more variance in terms of the shares they will submit, so you will not be getting enough credit for their workrate.