Partition vs. whole disk and creating encrypted filesystem...

With a new laptop I got a 1T disk which I intend to use as a data disk. So, it will have a single encrypted partition. This is a new disk with a 4K sector size and because of that fdisk tool offers me to start partition on 2048th sector. This is some alignment stuff from the old days of MSDOS, and obviously I don't want to waste disk space for those reasons. You can read more about that on Linux ATA Wiki. Linux is the only OS I'll use with this disk. It is possible to start partition from 63rd sector but if you are using fdisk you'll have to first create a partition and then switch to expert menu (option x) where it is possible to move beginning of the partition from 2048th to 63rd sector (option b).

Now, it is also possible to use the whole disk for a filesystem, without partition table. I found some discussions of pros and cons of this approach. Additional question is if the Fedora will recognize such disks during a boot process. LWM HOWTO also talks about this issue. It seems that everything boils down to the problem if some other tools or operating systems, that expect disk to be partitioned, treat disk as unpartitioned and thus destroy data on it. Also, someone noted possible performance degradation, but this was not confirmed by simple testing (look at the first link I gave), and besides, why would that happen when you use the whole disk? It can not be better aligned, can it? Also, someone used the whole disk for his Gentoo OS and then he had to install GRUB. Since GRUB, during installation, asks you whether you want it to be installed on, e.g. /dev/sda or /dev/sda1, it seems that it isn't important if you don't have partition table. But, I didn't go more deeper in this.

In the end, I decided to use the whole disk, no partitions. This disk will hold a single partition, will have only data on it, it will never be used on anything other than Linux, actually, on anything other than my laptop. So, this is the way I decided to go.

So, from that point on everything was very simple:

1. Encrypt the whole disk

# cryptsetup luksFormat /dev/sdc

WARNING!
========
This will overwrite data on /dev/sdc irrevocably.

Are you sure? (Type uppercase yes): YES
Enter LUKS passphrase:
Verify passphrase:

2. Open crypted disk:

   # cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sdc cryptodev1
   Enter passphrase for /dev/sdc:

3. Create file system:

# mkfs -t ext4 /dev/mapper/cryptodev1
mke2fs 1.42.5 (29-Jul-2012)
Filesystem label=
OS type: Linux
Block size=4096 (log=2)
Fragment size=4096 (log=2)
Stride=0 blocks, Stripe width=0 blocks
61054976 inodes, 244190134 blocks
12209506 blocks (5.00%) reserved for the super user
First data block=0
Maximum filesystem blocks=4294967296
7453 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

Allocating group tables: done
Writing inode tables: done
Creating journal (32768 blocks): done
Writing superblocks and filesystem accounting information: done

4. Remove reserved blocks (5% by default):

# tune2fs -m 0 /dev/mapper/cryptodev1
tune2fs 1.42.5 (29-Jul-2012)
Setting reserved blocks percentage to 0% (0 blocks)

5. Finally, mount a disk:

# mount /dev/mapper/cryptodev1 /mnt

And that's basically it. When you want to use disk, and it is not mounted, then you first have to open crypted device (step 2) and then you mount newly created file system.