First mac, questions on managing external drives

Have been using iphones, ipods, apple tv's, ipads for a long time.  Finally got my first mac (macbook air).  Hoping some people can help with a few questions on external drives, I have two nas drives on my network:
- In finder each drive shows up with its official name, is there any way to give it an alias type name (in windows I would map it to a letter).
- On the NAS there is a 'share' folder with all of my content.  I added this to my devices section for easy access, but again, is there a way to give this an alias?  Both NAS's have 'share' folders and I can't tell the difference between them.  I see an option to create an 'alias' for folders within share, but can I create an alias name that apps can recognize for the 'share' itself?
- I added the 'share' to my login list for my account to mount it on startup, is that the best way to do it?  I checked the box to hide it but the finder still pops up with it on startup.
- General question on finder.  When I download and install software it usually shows up on the desktop and in finder with an 'eject' button next to it.  Aren't these just folders with files in them or are they something different that causes them to have an eject button?  Just trying to understand how things work behind the scenes and it is confusing to see downloaded software behave like an external device that you would eject.
Thanks in advance for any help you can provide.  Really like the mac in general, but just need to adjust to all the new concepts.
Thanks,
Peter

plampione wrote:
- I added the 'share' to my login list for my account to mount it on startup, is that the best way to do it?  I checked the box to hide it but the finder still pops up with it on startup.
i may have an alternative:
if you are comfortable with AppleScript, you could edit this script to suit your situation:
try
mount volume "afp://<AirPort Extreme Name>.local/<Share Volume Name>"as user name "<Share Username>" with password "<Share password>"
end try
this script just places the drive's icon on the desktop. save it as an application and add that to your login items. 
credit for the script goes to Tesserax.
When I download and install software it usually shows up on the desktop and in finder with an 'eject' button next to it.  Aren't these just folders with files in them or are they something different that causes them to have an eject button?
those are .dmg's (disk images).

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