The future is looking gloomier for hard disk drives as the price of consumer solid state (flash) drives continues to plummet.

The average price of an SSD is set to hit $0.24 per gigabyte in 2016, down from $0.39 per gigabyte this year, according to new research from DRAMeXchange. And the price for SSDs will continue to tumble, hitting a new low of just $0.17 per gigabyte by 2017. Meanwhile, the price of the average HDD will stagnate at about $0.06 per gigabyte for the next three or four years.

All this is great news for consumers of course, as it means they’ll be able to get their hands on a 256GB SSD for about the same price as a 1TB HDD by this time next year. Meanwhile by 2017, a 512GB SSD will cost just $44 more than a 256GB HDD. At today’s rates, most PC makers charge around $100 extra for the same upgrade, and DRAMeXchange’s Alan Chen said most consumers would take advantage of the cheaper prices, with SSD adoption in laptops set to rise to 42 percent in 2017, from 26 percent today.

The majority of consumers will prefer to buy SSDs due to the numerous advantages they hold over HDDs. The general consensus is SSDss are faster, lighter, cooler, quieter, more energy efficient and more robust than HDDs, and in most cases consumers will decide the benefits far outweigh the minimal premium they have to pay for them.

But why is SSD getting cheaper? According to DRAMeXchange, increased competition from storage makers is one of the main factors. The research firm cites “significant technological advantages” they’ve made in the last year. For example, Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., recently began hawking the world’s first 16TB SSD with its underlying 3D NAND technology to the server market. With companies like Intel, Micron Technology Inc., SanDisk Corp. and Toshiba Corp. all said to be working on producing their own 3D NAND flash chips, it won’t be long until it becomes an option in cheaper consumer SSDs.

DRAMeXchange’s estimates fall in line with a similar prediction from Wikibon CTO & Co-founder David Floyer, who wrote in his 2015 Storage Cost Assumptions report that capacity flash is on a trajectory to be lower cost than capacity disk in 2016.

For enterprises and consumers alike, the sharp decline in SSD prices is something to keep in mind when considering buying new server units or laptops. While HDD prices will remain constant, the cost of SSD will decline steadily for some time to come, giving individuals and organizations the chance to stretch their budgets further.

Still, we should perhaps bear in mind that external factors still have the potential to upset the applecart. The 2011 floods in Thailand that sent HDD prices soaring springs to mind, and there’s also the potential for innovations like increasing HDD capacities that might make the latter option more appealing to some buyers.

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