Hi there,
Depending on the performance characteristics you are looking for as well as data persistence features there are a few options, "Local SSD" is one, but there are others.
Have a look at this page on disks: https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/disks
These are the disks providing block storage that are attached to your VM - you will be using one already to run the VM and you can attach others. In terms of SSD specifically you have a few options. First there are "Persistent Disks" or "PD", these as the name suggests are persistent, you can stop and start a VM and the data will persist. You have several options for SSD on PD:
"Balanced" persistent disks provide, as the name suggests, an SSD backed storage option that has a balance of price and performance.
"SSD" persistent disks take it a step up and provide better performance but that comes at a higher cost.
There is "Extreme" persistent disks, also SSD backed, but these are really for specific use cases and require some specific VM configurations too.
If however the use of the storage is temporary or ephemeral - for example for some high speed cache or similar, you could also look to the "Local SSD" option as you mention. This provides very high speed locally attached SSD storage, but your application needs to be prepared that if the VM is stopped or terminated for any reason all the data will be lost. This is useful for very specific application scenarios, but if you need the data to persist you will need to take steps to safe guard it and perhaps look to Persistent disks instead.
In terms of accessing the files, these disks are all attached as local drives to the VM, so in Python you can access data stored on them like any other file in the file system.
If you want to download a file from the terminal - assuming you are using a Linux based OS not Windows - the easiest thing would be "scp", look here for some guidance on using "scp" as part of our gcloud CLI tool: https://cloud.google.com/sdk/gcloud/reference/compute/scp
This 3rd party article also provides some more background and guidance on "scp" and its use, so worth a read: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/scp-linux-command-example-how-to-ssh-file-transfer-from-remote-to-...
Hope that helps,
Alex
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