faster way to mount a remote file system than sshfs?

If you need to improve the speed for sshfs connections, try these options:

oauto_cache,reconnect,defer_permissions,noappledouble,nolocalcaches,no_readahead

command would be:

sshfs remote:/path/to/folder local -oauto_cache,reconnect,defer_permissions

Besides already proposed solutions of using Samba/NFS, which are perfectly valid, you could also achieve some speed boost sticking with sshfs by using quicker encryption (authentication would be as safe as usual, but transfered data itself would be easier to decrypt) by supplying -o Ciphers=arcfour option to sshfs. It is especially useful if your machine has weak CPU.

sshfs is using the SSH file transfer protocol, which means encryption.

If you just mount via NFS, it's of course faster, because not encrypted.

are you trying to mount volumes on the same network? then use NFS.