one of the things that had me scratching my head for a while was the fact that i could write to my mint and ubuntu mate partitions from bodhi without sudo even though both are mounted the same as gpart in mtab (ext4 rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,data=ordered 0 0) and have the same 755 permissions. it took me a little while to figure out that i could only specifically write to my home folder (not / or /home themselves) which has the same username or folders like /tmp with 777 permissions.
so you don’t necessarily have to chown the whole partition if you want write access. as long as you create a directory with sudo and either give that directory 777 permissions or chown it to your user.