BitTorrent claims that its Sync cloudless file sharing for transfering big files between devices is significantly faster than other popular cloud services. The company says Sync was 8x faster than Google Drive, 11x faster than OneDrive, and 16x faster than Dropbox. The company tested all four services by syncing a 1.36GB MP4 video file between two PCs. The transfer took 41 seconds with Sync, 11:24 with Dropbox, 7:39 with OneDrive, and 6:01 with Google Drive. All traffic traveled via hard line Ethernet cables through the company's 1 Gbps up/down connection.

The impact on you at home: While BitTorrent's study has an obvious inherent bias, it reinforces what we already know: it's hard to beat peer-to-peer file transfers in terms of speed. The bottom line for users is that if you need to transfer a big file at home, then BitTorrent Sync is your best bet to get it done fast. The only downside is that since Sync is "cloudless," you can't make room on your hard drive by offloading a big file onto third party servers the way you can with Dropbox or OneDrive.

It is obvious that it'shard to beat peer-to-peer file transfers in terms of speed. However, BitTorrent's test was based on local file transfers for Sync and not remote file sharing. It would be interesting to see how much impact remote transfers would have on Sync's speeds compared to cloud services.