A maneira mais rápida de criar um arquivo em um sistema Linux é usar fallocate
:
fallocate -l 50G file
Do homem:
fallocate is used to manipulate the allocated disk space for a file, either to deallocate or preallocate it.
For filesystems which support the fallocate system call, preallocation is done quickly by allocating blocks and marking them as uninitialized, requiring no IO to the data blocks. This is much faster than creating a file by filling it with zeros.
Supported for XFS (since Linux 2.6.38), ext4 (since Linux 3.0), Btrfs (since Linux 3.7) and tmpfs (since Linux 3.5).