One of the most important things to remember in being the Sales Manager for OWC is to look at the product from the customer’s perspective. What products do you need? Why do you need them? How will they benefit your work flow or lifestyle? It’s these questions that when answered, provide the basis for OWC’s principle of serving the customer.
The reason I bring this up is that besides being the Sales Manager for OWC, I’m also a customer. This is unique to many other professionals in my position as several Sales Managers will never purchase product from the company they work for. I, on the other hand, was a customer before I even worked here (the sales rep that sold me my first piece of RAM is now reporting to me) and still am today. Besides being the Sales Manager for OWC, I’m also a recording musician and resident audio expert. This means that my Mac Pro Quad Core 2.66Ghz machine gets its fair share of abuse on a regular basis.
Two weeks ago, I opened up a session in ProTools to begin recording a new song idea. My machine was straining to keep up. Audio was dropping, popping, clicking…it was terrible. I opened up the Activity Monitor only to find that I had 16MB of free memory out of 2GB! My hard drive space situation wasn’t much better. I was basically at a standstill because I needed more memory and more HD space. So, the next day I came into the office and literally went to www.macsales.com, clicked on “My OWC”, and let the website guide me to the RAM and HDs that were compatible with my machine. Within minutes, I placed an order for a 4GB kit for my Late 2006 Mac Pro as well as a new 1.0TB Hitachi 3.5″ SATA drive.
When I got the memory and HD, I immediately went home to install it. Having watched the corresponding in-house created OWC install videos for my machine previously, I already knew everything I needed to get the job done. The memory install took about two minutes. The hard drive install took a bit longer only because I had all four bays in my Mac Pro filled with hard drives. I had to replace one, so I had to do some creative data juggling. I removed the drive I had in bay 4 so I could install the new Hitachi drive. I then transferred almost 500GB of data to it from drives 2 & 3. Next, I swapped the drive in bay 3 for the Hitachi, and reinstalled the original drive back in bay 4.
Now if this sounds a bit confusing and time consuming, there was another solution available I didn’t consider at the time. I could have streamlined this entire process had I purchased a Newer Technology Voyager Q and eSATA Extender Cable Adapter. At that point, I could have put the new Hitachi drive in the Voyager Q connected via eSATA and transferred the files without the need to juggle drives. And now that I have an extra 250GB 3.5″ SATA drive lying around, I could really use a Mercury Elite-AL Pro enclosure to backup my song files too. These of course are next on my list to purchase. Suffice it to say, my Mac Pro is blazing-fast now—recording music is so much easier with more RAM and HD space.
The moral of my story is that I have some firsthand insight into how valuable OWC and Newer Technology solutions are to my work flow and lifestyle…which in turn helps me identify how valuable they are in serving you.
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