Local Drive

What Does Local DriveMean?

A local drive is a computer disk drive that is installed directly within the host or the local computer. It is a computer’s native hard disk drive (HDD), which is directly accessed by the computer for storing and retrieving data.

Techopedia Explains Local Drive

Local drive is one of the most common use models and implementations of an HDD. It is installed in a computer through any of the motherboard disk interfaces such as serial, ATAPI or SATA. A local drive can be contrasted with a network or remote drive, which is installed on a network server and accessed over the network.

As opposed to a network drive, a local drive provides much faster data access speed. Moreover, a computer can have more than one local drive.

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Margaret Rouse

Technology Expert

Margaret is an award-winning technical writer and teacher known for her ability to explain complex technical subjects to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.

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