Well, as it turns out if have “special” hard disks … the WD20* disks are susceptible to misalignment issues due to them having a logical sector size of 512 byte …

So here we go:

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parted --alignment optimal /dev/sdx
mklabel msdos
print
# now figure out how big you want the disks. make sure you
# don't use the whole space, as a replacement disk
# might have ~20 sectors less
mkpart primary 1 -1800
quit

Now, dump the partition layout to a file:

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sfdisk -d /dev/sdx > sdx.part