I am in the process of building my first RAID5 array. I've used mdadm to create the following set up:

root@bondigas:~# mdadm --detail /dev/md1
/dev/md1:
        Version : 00.90
  Creation Time : Wed Oct 20 20:00:41 2010
     Raid Level : raid5
     Array Size : 5860543488 (5589.05 GiB 6001.20 GB)
  Used Dev Size : 1953514496 (1863.02 GiB 2000.40 GB)
   Raid Devices : 4
  Total Devices : 4
Preferred Minor : 1
    Persistence : Superblock is persistent

    Update Time : Wed Oct 20 20:13:48 2010
          State : clean, degraded, recovering
 Active Devices : 3
Working Devices : 4
 Failed Devices : 0
  Spare Devices : 1

         Layout : left-symmetric
     Chunk Size : 64K

 Rebuild Status : 1% complete

           UUID : f6dc829e:aa29b476:edd1ef19:85032322 (local to host bondigas)
         Events : 0.12

    Number   Major   Minor   RaidDevice State
       0       8       16        0      active sync   /dev/sdb
       1       8       32        1      active sync   /dev/sdc
       2       8       48        2      active sync   /dev/sdd
       4       8       64        3      spare rebuilding   /dev/sde

While that's going I decided to format the beast with the following command:

root@bondigas:~# mkfs.ext4 /dev/md1p1 
mke2fs 1.41.11 (14-Mar-2010)
/dev/md1p1 alignment is offset by 63488 bytes.
This may result in very poor performance, (re)-partitioning suggested.
Filesystem label=
OS type: Linux
Block size=4096 (log=2)
Fragment size=4096 (log=2)
Stride=16 blocks, Stripe width=48 blocks
97853440 inodes, 391394047 blocks
19569702 blocks (5.00%) reserved for the super user
First data block=0
Maximum filesystem blocks=0
11945 block groups
32768 blocks per group, 32768 fragments per group
8192 inodes per group
Superblock backups stored on blocks: 
        32768, 98304, 163840, 229376, 294912, 819200, 884736, 1605632, 2654208, 
        4096000, 7962624, 11239424, 20480000, 23887872, 71663616, 78675968, 
        102400000, 214990848

Writing inode tables: ^C 27/11945
root@bondigas:~# ^C

I am unsure what to do about "/dev/md1p1 alignment is offset by 63488 bytes." and how to properly partition the disks to match so I can format it properly.