Secondary storage says permission denied when trying to create files and folders in root of drive

I have four storage devices connected to my computer.

/
/home
/media
/external

But when I try and create a folder in /media, for instance, as my normal user account, I get permission denied. I looked at the permissions for /media, and they were the same as all the other directories in /. Does that mean you need a superuser account to create files and folders in root directories of mounted devices and then you set permissions on that?

All drives are using the btrfs filesystem.

Sorry for all of the stupid questions but I’m not used to running Linux on my desktop computer or a computer with multiple drives mounted.

Yes, that’s correct for any native Linux filesystem. You may change permissions and ownership of root directory if you like as well.

And root can of course adapt the permission of /media so that others (the world) can have access.

Either make it read/write/executable for all, (rwxrwxrwx) or, do like /home and give every user his/her own sub-directory. In the second case look how this is done in /home: ( rwxr-xr-x for /media and change owner for the sub-directory and also set to rwxr-xr-x or similar according to wish).

My advice: please try to find a good explanation about file ownership by user and group and file permissions for read/write/execute for user/group world. Lack of knowledge here will bring you many surprises. And it improves understanding. You will then e.g. understand that your problem here has nothing to do with the fact that /media is on a different file system.

Thanks all. That makes me feel a whole lot better. I’ll do some reading into Linux user and group accounts so this sort of thing doesn’t happen again.