A local drive or local disk is a hard drive or SSD that is installed inside of or connected to your computer. It is not part of another computer on a network. For example, with most Microsoft Windows computers, the local drive or local disk is the denoted with “C:” label.

In the image above, the Primary Drive (C:) and Extra Space (F:) are the local drives on the computer. The DVD-RW Drive (E:) is a local disc drive, however, it is considered removable media. Any other network drives or cloud storage is a remote drive.

Drive, Hard drive terms, Local, Network drive

To view and find a local drive on a Windows computer, use Windows Explorer.

  • How to find how much hard drive space is available.
  • Why is the hard drive the C: drive?
  • Hard drive help and support.