Makesolutions.net

With AOL-owned Xdrive on the auction block, competing cloud storage providers are scrapping together all sorts of plans to woo these potential paying customers to their services. Two in particular, Drop.io and Box.net, have set up simple escape hatches wherein Xdrive users can simply plug in their account credentials and have their data piped over.

There's a catch, though: both services have free storage caps well beneath Xdrive's generous 5GB. In the case of Drop.io, that cap is 100MB. To supplement this, the service is offering Xdrive users a special premium drop, which bumps up the cap to 1GB. Normally these premium chunks of storage cost $10 a pop, and only keep for a year's time (read: subscription service).

Likewise, Box.net's free cutoff cap is 1GB. If a user wants more space than that they'll need to upgrade to a higher plan, which starts at $7.95 per month to get that same 5GB users had back on Xdrive.

So to summarize, if you're an Xdrive user looking to jettison your data to someplace besides a hard drive, either of these services is really great, but they'll cost you. The 5GB equivalent will be $40 in Drop.io (for your first year, then $50 after that), and $95.40 for a year in Box.net. If you're willing to stick to 1GB, Box.net is the better deal, since you won't have to pay $10 when free premium credit from Drop.io expires. You could also just throw caution to the wind, and go all-out with 50GB of ad-supported online storage from Adrive.