A system includes a processor, a storage system having one or more physical storage devices, and a controller coupled to the processor and the storage system. The controller maintains a virtual physical drive (VPD) map that defines a set of virtual physical drives, and maps the virtual physical drives to storage media of the physical storage devices. The controller receives access requests from the processor and controls the physical storage media according to the VPD map such that the virtual physical drives appear to the processor as physically independent drives. The controller provides hardware-level security to prevent unauthorized access by the processor or any software application executing on processor. In addition, the controller may maintain primary virtual storage and secondary virtual storage within the virtual physical drives, and may dynamically reallocate the virtual storage to backup and restore data in a manner that appears almost instantaneous to the user.