How to align partitions for best performance using parted

There are two common problems when creating partitions in Linux on big storage arrays. The first is easy, and the warning message from fdisk is a bit of a giveaway:

WARNING: The size of this disk is 8.0 TB (7970004230144 bytes).
DOS partition table format can not be used on drives for volumes
larger than (2199023255040 bytes) for 512-byte sectors. Use parted(1) and GUID 
partition table format (GPT).

The answer: use parted. Don’t have it? Install it!

The second problem is this warning from parted:

(parted) mklabel gpt
(parted) mkpart primary 0 100%
Warning: The resulting partition is not properly aligned for best performance.
Ignore/Cancel?

…and no matter what combination of numbers you use, the message just keeps
coming back. It’s tempting to ignore it, but don’t.

There are a few posts on the subject, but this one from HP really gets to
the guts of the problem.

Here’s a quick step-by-step guide to aligning partitions properly. It’s just
an abstraction of the HP post, but hopefully easier to follow. This will work
for most arrays (in fact it works for all the arrays that I’ve seen); there
are more options in HP’s post, but I’ve included the most common configuration here.

• 1.Get the alignment parameters for your array (remember to replace sdb with the
  name of your device as seen by the kernel).

  # cat /sys/block/sdb/queue/optimal_io_size
  1048576
  # cat /sys/block/sdb/queue/minimum_io_size
  262144
  # cat /sys/block/sdb/alignment_offset
  0
  # cat /sys/block/sdb/queue/physical_block_size
  512

• 2.Add optimal_io_size to alignment_offset and divide the result by
  physical_block_size. In my case this was (1048576 + 0) / 512 = 2048.

• 3.This number is the sector at which the partition should start. Your new
  parted command should look like

  mkpart primary 2048s 100%

  The trailing ‘s’ is important: it tells parted that you’re talking about sectors,
  not bytes or megabytes.

• 4.If all went well, the partition will have been created with no warnings.
  You can check the alignment thusly (replacing ‘1’ with the partition number if necessary):

  (parted) align-check optimal 1                                            
  1 aligned

As I alluded to before, there are cases where this won’t work: if optimal_io_size
is zero, for example, there are other rules to follow. Of course it would be nice
if parted could do this—the values are all available as ioctls, after all”but
then what would I write about?