I just upgraded to Ximain GNOME Desktop on my office workstation. Cleverly, it spotted all the SMB shares I had mounted in /mnt, and put them all on my desktop as icons. The icons were stylized drawings of HD platters.

The Mac does it little better - the default HD icon on my OS X TiBook was a very nice drawing of a hard drive, another thing that your average user isn't likely to recognise. I know, I've done tech support. 75% of the people I did end-user support for when I worked at Q-Net thought "hard drive" meant "That big off-white box thingy with all the computer stuff in it. Windows 9x represent drives as plastic things that seem to represent external hard drive cases, something that's not exactly been common for PC users since the early 90's.

I spent a while thinking about this, and the reason we can't come up with a good metaphor for drive arrangement that doesn't assume the user knows what a hard drive is, and what one looks like. I then hit myself on the forehead and realised I was thinking the wrong way around.

All our icons for hard drives suck because... the hard drive is not a concept that the UI should be exposing to the user. Until we abstract the filesystem to the point at which it is invisible to the user, and the user just thinks in terms of organising and sorting their various bits and pieces, filesystem programmers and desktop UI designers haven't done their job properly.