Manually mount an external drive as user with full permissions

Question

How can I mount an external drive with read/write permissions for my user name?

I have tried mounting the drive in both /mnt and ~/mnt through fstab, but neither gives wdkrnls write priviledge.

fstab:

LABEL=500-hitachi /home/wdkrnls/mnt/500-hitachi ext4 defaults,users 0 1

How the drive is being mounted in my home directory via ls -lah:

total 24K
drwxr-xr-x 3 root     root  4.0K Oct  8 20:46 .
drwxr-xr-x 3 wdkrnls  users 4.0K Oct 14 14:14 ..
drwx------ 2 root     root   16K Oct  8 20:46 lost+found

Answer 1

With the ext4 filesystem, permissions do not depend on mount options. (Although there was a proposed patch for that, but it was rejected.) You will have to use chown and/or chmod to give yourself write permissions.

Answer 2

In addition to grawity's informative answer, you can use the pmount utility from extra to easily mount devices with rw permissions as a normal user.