Modern Windows aligns the first partition on a 1 MB boundary.
As far as disks go, initially the plan was to have "legacy" branded
drives with 63-sector alignment. But I think that has been abandoned in
favor of instant one-time formatting. I.e. you can pick your poison
*once* and that formatting will be done in constant time. Any
subsequent changes to blocking and alignment will require a real
low-level format.