Mount USB HDD by uuid on boot automatically

To find the UUID of the external hdd

ls -lah /dev/disk/by-uuid/

You will find the UUID of the drive by that command. Then add a similar line like given below by changing the UUID of your partition to the /etc/fstab

nano /etc/fstab

UUID=4886310c-6381-4dcfe2eb4c85d /home/USER/MOUNT/LOCATION   ext3  defaults    0 0

Also to hide the icons of the mounted drives from Desktop, from dconf

org.gnome.nautilus.desktop 

uncheck "volumes_visible"