[CentOS] RHEL/Centos6 handling disks w/4k sectors?

> the best write speed I can get is about 8MB/sec


A while back I researched 4k sector drives since most new drives have them
now. There is a problem with speed if you get the partition wrong.

The answer seems to be to creating a partition with 1 meg of unpartitioned
space preceding the first partition. This causes sector 2048 to be the first
sector of the partition, and avoids the problem.

Newer versions of gparted do this for you automatically when you use it to
create a partition.