It turns out that the built in fsutil OS utility can quickly create an empty file of any size. For example: fsutil file createnew test.txt 1300000000 Will create a file 100 billion bytes in size.
For my scenario I needed to create a low disk space situation on an Always On Availability Group secondary replica. I created a couple of files that reduced the free space to a few hundred megabytes and then ran a simple query on the primary to do a bunch of large row inserts. Once the disk space was exhausted and the data file could no longer autogrow, AlwaysOn suspended data movement as expected. Several alerts were raised including:
C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL13.MSSQLSERVER\MSSQL\DATA\CreditLog.ldf: Operating system error 112(There is not enough space on the disk.) encountered.
I corrected the low disk space scenario by deleting the newly-created file. I then manually resumed data movement.
