By:  Alan Henry

If you're like me, you either own or know someone who owns a couple dozen old issues of the National Geographic magazine stashed away in a box somewhere in the attic or the back corner of a closet somewhere. Unfortunately, all that paper is wasting away slowly wasting away, and if you ever want to show off those old issues you may be out of luck if you're not storing them properly.

Instead, you could pick up the complete collection of all National Geographic magazines on a single 160GB USB hard drive. National Geographic recently announced the drive, and it's available for $199.95 in their web store.

Every National Geographic magazine printed in the past 120 years is available on the drive, along with special features like maps, additional photos, and a custom interface to use to explore the magazines and other media. You can even use a built-in world map to visually search for articles and photos based on the part of the world you're interested in. The interface even allows you to test your knowledge of certain parts of the world or use the drive as an educational tool to teach others about exploration, geography, or the many cultures that have been documented in National Geographic over the years.

The collection itself doesn't take up the entire drive; there's additional space for your personal files and media, and the drive even has room for additional issues of National Geographic magazine when it comes out. The drive has custom versions of its interface and applications for both Mac OS X (10.4.11 or higher) and Windows. (2000 or higher)

The new hard drive version of the Complete National Geographic is essentially a reproduction of the already available DVD-based version that comes on 6 DVD-ROMs and costs $89.95. However, if you'd rather have the collection on a single USB drive that's customized with the National Geographic logo on it instead of worrying about carrying multiple physical disks in a carrying case, the drive might be worth the extra cost.