Accessing USB drive

I'm going to start some C coding that involves accessing raw USB HDDs.

I've connected a USB drive and fired up Terminal and issued the dd and od commands:

MacBook:~ Son_t$ dd if=/dev/disk1 bs=1 skip=0 count=1024 |od -t x4
0000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000
*
0000660 00000000 00000000 00000000 000000af
0000700 000008a8 f8a00000 00000000 001000af
0000720 00000008 00000000 000008a8 f8b000af
0000740 000000a0 00000000 000008b0 f8b00000
0000760 00000000 00000000 00000000 000055aa
0001000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000
*
1024+0 records in
1024+0 records out
1024 bytes transferred in 0.010797 secs (94841 bytes/sec)
0002000
MacBook:~ Son_t$

So far so good! :)