writing large files quickly

[casevh at comcast.net]

rbt wrote:
> I've been doing some file system benchmarking. In the process, I need to
> create a large file to copy around to various drives. I'm creating the
> file like this:
>
> fd = file('large_file.bin', 'wb')
> for x in xrange(409600000):
>      fd.write('0')
> fd.close()
>
> This takes a few minutes to do. How can I speed up the process?
>
> Thanks!

Untested, but this should be faster.

block = '0' * 409600
fd = file('large_file.bin', 'wb')
for x in range(1000):
     fd.write('0')
fd.close()