Physical storage is sometimes referred to as local storage. Physical storage includes hard disk drives, solid-state drives, and USB flash drives. Each of the physical storage drives plays a different role in storing data.

The hard disk drive works by allowing an arm to move rapidly on the disk reading and writing data in small sections called sectors. The sectors are then combined to create larger files. I hard drive can hold a range of information spanning from 500 GB to 10 TB.

Solid state drives also known as SSD can replace traditional HDD drives. One of the largest differences between HDD and SDD is that SDD is faster. SDD can load applications and save data at a fraction of the time it takes HDD. Instead of an arm SSD uses a flash controller to read, write and store data.

Another physical storage is USB Flash drives. Flash drives like SSD use a flash connector to read data yet, USB Flash drives are portable. The drive is plugged into the PC and a notification informs the user of the device. Once the user can access the device, they can then save new information or pull up stored information on the disk.