Is it possible to remove the HDD icons from the desktop (without unmounting them)? I have a lot of partitions and I dont need them all on the desktop, thats what the Finder should be for.

Yes, you can.
In Finder, go to Preferences and deselect "Hard Disks"

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If you remove them how do you get to them later when you need to access files without going back into Finder's Preferences?

Always you have access from any window

Click to view attachment

Silly me.

I guess you mean the windows from 'Go'.

Thanks, I also wished clicking on the finder icon would open up something else besides the stupid Home folder, I didnt know you could customize that too. Ideally I would like to keep just the OS X disk on the desktop but oh well, I can just create an alias.

you can change the place that finer automatically goes to --- its right there in finder prefs

I know that now, hence why I said "I didnt know you could" which is past tense