Hi,
my harddrive broke down so I got a new one, and I decided for a new start from scratch and to try to do everything right this time. I tried looking up partition alignment, but couldn't figure it out, sorry, too much contradicting infos out there. Never cared for these things in the past but writing/reading has always been rather slow. So I want to do better this time.

My new drive is a toshiba 2tb and according to gsmartcontrol it uses the following sector sizes at the moment: 512 logical / 4096 physical. So I'd like it to actually use 4096 and properly allign the partitons for it. How do I switch the drive to use 4096 logically?

This is the partiton table I'd like to create:

partition 1: 10 GB Linux (reiserfs) for my Backup and boot/control System
partition 2: 6 GB swap

then use a logical volume for the remaining space of the disk with the following partitons:

partition 5: 50 GB Linux (whatever type) for testing new distros
partition 6: 50 GB Linux (ext4) for productive system (newest Mint)
partition 7: 50 GB Linux (whatever type) for secondary Linux (probably debian but not sure yet)
partiton 8: remaining drive space Linux (reiser) for data storage to symlink (some) home folders to

I've done setups like these often so I know the basic steps, but I never cared for alignment.

Can anyone please tell me how to set this up WITH proper partition alignment and using 4096 sector size?

Thanks for any help in advance.

You really do not want to use a BS of 4096

yes you can do it , but
512 or 1024 and a few partitions is much better


but if you want
The current Gparted can do it

but not every OS can use a 4096 size

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Use gptfdisk, it will do it automatically for you. You can create GPT partition table with it and it will work fine with BIOS motherboard (as long as Windows is not involved).

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You don't try to change the logical sector size. It takes a very new kernel and tool set to even work with 4096 byte logical, and even then it is very much bleeding edge. You just keep the 512 byte logical size and make sure that every partition starts on a logical block address that is a multiple of 8. Modern partitioning tools, such as gparted, default to 1-Megabyte alignment, which is fine. The most likely way to go wrong would be to use an old tool like fdisk and work in "cylinder" units. That's pretty much guaranteed to cause misalignment unless you are very clever. (Recent versions of fdisk default to "sector" units and start the first partition at sector 2048, which is 1 Megabyte into the disk.)

After you've done the partitioning, you can check by running "fdisk -l -u" and verifying that each starting sector number is a multiple of 8.

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Not only gptfisk as Emerson told you, but you can use gparted or even the cli parted which is pre-installed in most of current distros
as you can see, partition 1 is aligned in a disk which has physical sectors size of 4096B.

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