I have a 240Gb SSD and installed Manjaro a few weeks ago.
I remember that at the time of installation, I chose the SSD and marked the installation to use the entire disk, removing everything that was previously on it.
However, today I was looking at the system’s GParted and my disk has 2.00MiB + 2.49MiB unallocated, one part at the beginning and one at the end.
Can anyone tell me:
IIRC, it is for alignment. You can either align to cylinder or by MiB. I believe you’re aligning to cylinder, which is fine.
Version 0.6.6 introduces a Windows-style 2048-sector (1MB) alignment for all unpartitioned disks and attempts to infer the alignment used in the past on disks with existing partitions.
You can probably disable alignment in GParted / Parted if you like.
So these 2 spaces (at the beginning and at the end) of my SSD were purposely made at install time, and is this good for the overall functioning of the system?
Where can I check alignment in GParted and disable it?
This is something that has also been bothering me for a long time: During an automatic installation with Calamares, in any case (no matter if HDD or SSD) these unoccupied storage spaces are created. But as far as I understood the publications about partitioning, the sector alignment only affects mechanical hard disks. If it is somewhere about partitioning for Linux, in the tips the partitions are always created immediately at 0. So, what to do with an SSD?
Unless for aesthetics (it bothers me as well) it is not worth the worry and can potentially be quite counter-productive in case your SSD doesn’t do a good job of wear levelin. The few MB of “wasted” space pay for your FS blocksize aligning properly to the drive’s block size without overlap. Not being a storage-expert but from my understanding I would leave it as is. Further reading also here Solid-state drive - Wikipedia Also - storage is complicated, SSD firmware even more, not touching what the smart guys set as a default won’t hurt. 
II’m not talking about “wasted” storage space, that’s nonsense. But as a consequence, I would have to set it up on my data HDD and on the external backup disks as well, because an HDD certainly needs it more. The question is: how much MiB do you give at the beginning and how much at the end? I don’t think that can be answered with a flat rate of 1 MiB.
I’ve marked this answer as the solution to your question as it is by far the best answer you’ll get.
However, if you disagree with my choice, please feel free to take any other answer as the solution to your question or even remove the solution altogether: You are in control! (If you disagree with my choice, just send me a personal message and explain why I shouldn’t have done this or 
or 
if you agree)
P.S. In the future, please don’t forget to come back and click the 3 dots below the answer to mark a solution like this below the answer that helped you most:
so that the next person that has the exact same problem you just had will benefit from your post as well as your question will now be in the “solved” status.
You should just use parted or gparted and have it aligned to cylinder automatically, and then you don’t have to worry about how much MiB.
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