I have a new Samsung 840 250GB SSD on the way, and I want to make sure that everything is running optimally after install.

I've spent many frustrating hours on the internet trying to understand how I should align the partitions of the SSD when it arrives (and even how to partition everything; my other drive is a 1TB HDD with files already on it). I'd like to know a foolproof way of setting everything up.

Now, the only place I could find the erase block size of the 840 is here:

http://thessdreview.com/Forums/ssd-beginners-guide-discussion/3630.htm

I simply can't understand why such information isn't made freely accessible by manufacturers! But, anyway, this would suggest the EBS is 1536kb, which seems odd to me.

It is to my understanding that you should now align by MiB (usually set at 1MiB). I assume that the figure above should actually be 1536k B=1.5MiB? This seems to suggest the partition alignment will be somewhat non-standard.

So my question is: How do I align my partitions given this information? Please bear in mind that I have never used linux before; I'm doing my best to get everything set up so that I can begin to learn but am finding this process incredibly opaque and time consuming. If possible, a step by step guide through GParted would be great; at the moment I'm considering an NTFS partition ~20GB for Windows (playing games), an EXT4 ~20GB for ubuntu (for doing everything else) and a shared documents+games partition for everything else in NTFS file format. I'm not going to have any swap partition and use swap files instead.