how to correctly create a partition and format it?

Question

i have an usb flash drive and i'd like to create a single ext4 partition on it with parted and mke2fs. the drive has 15,644,672 sectors (512 bytes each). since the first sector (sector 0) is reserved to the mbr, i have 15,644,671 sectors left (from 1 to 15,644,671). i could create a partition here, but since the filesystem, by default, uses 4,096 bytes for each block, the number of sectors should be multiple of 4,096/512=8. this means i should use 15,644,664 sectors only. i could use 1,024 bytes blocks instead and have a partition with 15,644,670 sectors. if i remember correctly, another (much more important) thing to consider is that files or directories occupy only an integer number of blocks. even a 0 byte file occupies either 1,024, 2,048 or 4,096 bytes. so the smallest possible block size seems to me the best choice. are there other rules to check? thanks.

Answer 1

Easiest way: Install GParted and use that.