ReiserFS is "fast"
wouter@rock:~$ time dd if=/dev/zero of=sparsefile count=1 bs=1k seek=1G 1+0 records in 1+0 records uit 1024 bytes transferred in 0,522148 seconds (1961 bytes/sec) real 6m26.308s user 0m0.011s sys 1m13.094s wouter@rock:~$ time rm sparsefile real 3m14.809s user 0m0.001s sys 1m33.124s wouter@rock:~$
Hell yeah.