Showing Drives on the Desktop

Hi Everybody . . . Please see my Mini's specs under my avatar. I am aware that under Preferences you can choose to display the drives connected to your computer on the Desktop. I have a WD 3TB firewire 800 ext hdd connected. It has 7 partitions...TM, Carbon Copy Cloner, Music, Movies, Photos, Web Site, and Misc Documents. Since this drive is always connected and I know what all is there, I do not need to keep the icons displayed on my Desktop. However, if I connect a USB flash drive, camera, thumb drive, etc. I would like very much to be able to see them and access them via the Desktop. Is there a way to not show the WD partition drives (since they will always be there & accessible through Finder) and just show any temporary drives that are connected that I will be working with for a short period?...or is this Preference feature AON (all or none)? How do the power users handle this?

Also, I am running Snow Leopard. If I do have to show ALL the connected drives, is there any way to change the icons on the partitions on the WD ext hdd? They are pretty generic and bland. I realize I could change the colors.
I do not want to use any 3rd party apps...I am hoping Snow Leopard offers something. Thanks! . . . Brent

AS for the icons, you can download OSX icons from the net and copy and paste them in to the picture icon when you select get info for any icon

As an aside, having all your backup eggs in one basket, plus a bunch of media stuff you're probably not backing up ... not really a very good strategy. If that drive goes down, you're losing nearly as much as if your boot drive went.

Thanks, chas_m . . . I whole-heartedly agree with you. I need to rethink my set-up. I still have my WD 1TB USB 2.0 ext hdd and it works fine...just slow transfers and boots. Also, flash drives are an excellent, inexpensive way to back up media stuff. OK, here is the dumb question of the day that I am pretty sure I already know the answer to...Can I set up CCC on and boot from a USB thumb/flash drive? I have one flash drive already with the Combo Updater and various other .dmg's in case there is ever a need to perform a hdd wipe and clean install.

Asking again...anybody have any ideas about showing the drives on the Desktop in the original post?

.....................and thanks, louishen for the tip about OS X icon dl's. I checked into them. I saw a couple of links about making my own and I may go that route.

The answer to your original question is no. The Finder preferences allow you to turn on and off the showing of "external drives" but don't make a distinction between an external WD HD and a USB flash drive ... those are all "external drives."

The answer to your latest question is probably yes. I'd have to double-check that your machine can boot from a USB thumb drive but I believe that if you a) format it for Mac booting and b) use CCC or (Mountain) Lion Diskmaker to create a bootable system drive on the thumb drive, it will work. It will be DOG SLOW, but it will work (and probably still be faster than booting from a CD, not that that's an option these days).