I have a new disk that uses 4kb sectors. Unfortunately, on the system it's installed in, none of the partitioning tools deal with this automatically, leading to near-guaranteed misalignment and slower performance, or so says the Googled results (JFGI yourself... I'm too lazy to paste the links here). So, here's what I did:

 # parted /dev/sdc
 (parted) unit s
 (parted) mklabel gpt
 (parted) mkpart primary ext3 64s -1s
 (parted) quit

 # mke2fs -j -L SOMELABEL -m 0 -b 4096 /dev/sdc1