Left, right, up, down?

This isn't related specifically to Linux or GParted but to the manner we use to show information on screen or printed on paper.

In fact, there is no left, right, up or down on the physical medium. In a memory circuit like flash or ssd drives, there are combinations of electrical lines in 1 or more multilayer circuits. In a hard drive (and floppy drive too) there are recordings arranged by sectors on parallel circular "tracks", and usually on 2 or more parallel plates that turn together. There is nothing "linear" to this. Perhaps the only linear medium is the magnetic tape (old, slow but still trusted medium ), where info is written sequentially from the beginning to the end of the tape.

In order to overcome problems with hardware-specific differences, every medium shows its content in a linear arrangement, where every block takes a sequential number, that is its "address number" (from 0 to some millions or billions). So, we tell that the partition that begins on the block 2000 is located before ( = at the left) of a partition that begins on the block, say, 1000000. This is obviously (I guess, at least) inspired by the fact that many things in our civilization go from left to right (mainly the manner we write). This isn't universal, of course. There are scripts from right to left, from up to down, so that half of the humanity doesn't follow the rule "from left to right". So, it is just a conventional manner to represent things.

From the practical point of view concerning GParted, we have to remember that various processes are performed in a different way if we change the beginning of a partition or its end, so that growing a partition "to the left" (i.e. moving the start block) can be much longer than do it "to the right" (i.e. moving the end sector to a sector with a bigger address number).

The left to right representation is the graphical representation on screen. On a text output we usually report 1 partition be line, so the "first" partition is written above. However be careful: the order of the partition in the partition table isn't always the same as they are located on the hard drive.

PS. Topic moved to the "GParted" section.