I want to use my new USB drive exclusively with Linux, so I decided to wipe the factory default partitions and create a new ext4 filesystem on the drive. The drive uses 4096 byte physical sectors and we have to make sure that the new partition is correctly aligned. For some background information on partition alignment, see this link.

Check that we are wiping the correct drive

sudo parted /dev/sdb unit s print free

Note the details in case you want to restore the original partitioning scheme. Information on the factory default can also be found here.