I don’t recommend using Time Capsule for 2 reasons: price and wireless. The price tag is unjustifiable for a router, despite its praised stability. Now with the hint of Apple may be dropping the router line of its entirety, stability is not longer an accountable virtue. At any rate, it is the wireless backup drive which I would focus on, and I find the very idea hilarious. We are talking about creating a backup at least upward of 1TB with the expectancy of continuous increment. This backup, or as in Mac ecosystem, Time Machine, is supposed to be a life saver. No life saver comes in wireless form, and don’t take your chances with wireless. Given the fact that it is equivalent of sending a TB worth of information to NAS, backup activity alone would clog the wireless traffic. This is just not a justifiable practice, aside from being “wireless”.

So if you own a portable or non-portable time machine backup drive, one of the irritations you’d easily notice is how the drive you will never manually use takes up space on desktop. As a time machine drive, you wouldn’t be using the drive for anything but backup. FYI, do designate a backup drive and use that drive solely for backup; if you need more space, buy a proper external drive as a carry-on. You can actually mitigate and balance the risks of failure by simply separating the disks. To sum it all up, there is no need to have a Time Machine backup drive icon standing there on the desktop screen, unless you disconnect it frequently. You won’t use it. Period. I won’t either.

Here’s a simple solution. Use these commands in Terminal.

To Hide the icon (copy-paste and replace brackets with TM drive path):
 chflags hidden [Time Machine path]
 killall Finder

To Unhide icon ("):
 chflags nohidden [Time Machine path]
 killall Finder

It’s a simple solution. First command will either hide or unhide the the icon, and the second command will reset the Finder

updated Nov 9, 2017: updated to reflect the rumor of Apple may be dropping Time Capsule line.