TODO: somewhere: cgdisk (part of gdisk package) is sweet for GPT as required for > 2 TB and it does 4096 physical sector alignment automatically.

Technical background

Block device partitioning has a long history, related to the physical construction of hard disk drives – to their cylinders, heads and sectors.  Current hard disk drives present themselves to the operating system as a simple sequence of blocks.  For practical partitioning purposes the physical construction no longer matters except that Zone Bit Recording means that a partition at the beginning of the drive (physically the outer edge) transfers data faster than one at the end of the drive.  With the introduction of 4k sector sizes, aligning partitions on sector boundaries has become important.

...