Essentially a duplicate of
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ux-4175611133/
You seem to be confused on drives vs partitions. /dev/sdb is a drive, /dev/sdb will always be the raw drive, it will never be a partition. When you create a partition on /dev/sdb, that partition will be called /dev/sdb1. The second partition will be /dev/sdb2, etc.
/dev/sdb is always the raw drive.