Secondary storage devices are used to permanently store large amounts of data due to the limited storage of primary memory. They include floppy disks, hard disks, magnetic tape, pen drives, optical disks, and external drives. Secondary storage devices have higher storage capacity than primary memory but are slower, hold data permanently even when powered off, and require data to be copied to primary memory to be accessed by the CPU. They each have different characteristics in terms of storage size, portability, data access speed, and application.