O espaço reservado antes é conhecido como alinhamento de partição; 1MiB é reservado por padrão por parted.
Ele é reservado geralmente por motivos de desempenho, seja em mídia física ou em VMs.
Partition alignment is understood to mean the proper alignment of partitions to the reasonable boundaries of a data storage device (such as a hard disk, solid-state drive (SSD) or RAID volume).
Proper partition alignment ensures ideal performance during data access. Incorrect partition alignment will cause reduced performance, especially with regard to SSDs (with an internal page size of 4,096 or 8,192 bytes, for example), hard disks with four-kilobyte (4,096 byte) sectors and RAID volumes.
veja também Alinhamento da partição do sistema operacional convidado
An unaligned partition results in the I/O crossing a track boundary and causes an additional I/O. This incurs a penalty on latency and throughput. The additional I/O (especially if small) can impact system resources significantly on some host types. An aligned partition ensures that the single I/O is serviced by a single device, eliminating the additional I/O and resulting in overall performance improvement.