Linux: How to align partition and file system on hardware RAID

I have a test box (PowerEdge 2950) with a Perc 6/i and 4x 15.5k SAS drives attached (with 512 byte block sizes). These are in a single RAID 5 virtual disk with a 64KB chunk size.

I am creating a single test partition that spans the whole drive. Should it be aligned to the 64KB chunk mark, or 512 byte block size? If the later, the partition could start at 2048 bytes into the single virtual disk, meaning it will begin at the 2nd free block on the first drive (I assume)?

Also, I will add another two drives and recreate the RAID virtual disk at a later date for more testing, should the partition then be created at 6x512 bytes, so from 3072 bytes?

I have read a couple of similar questions on this but I couldn't see from those, how the chunk size of the RAID volume might relate to partition alignment, on drive block size when using a single drive.

If you use the a starting sector of 2048 (512 byte) sectors, then your partition will start 1MB into the drive. This value is used as the by default on most newer installers. This number is nicely divisible by 64k, and most other common chunk/block sizes.

If you are partitioning with fdisk then make pass the -u flag. So it reports the values in 512 byte sectors instead of cylinders.

Since you are using ext* you can use this calculator to determine the strip size and stride width for the filesystem. I am showing that you would want to create your filesystem with these options: mkfs.ext3 -b 4096 -E stride=16,stripe-width=48. You might want to try just creating the filesystem without passing options and seeing what mkfs detects and uses (check with tune2fs -l /dev/sdnn). These days it seems to do a pretty good job automatically detecting the size/width.