I'm a bit stumped as to what problem you're actually having.  Have you added yourself to the storage, disk, dbus and wheel groups?  I face palmed a few times trying to figure out that some of the random behavior I was getting with desktop environments were being caused by this. In fact some things just don't mount properly for some reason I have to do it manually with disks utility in xfce. I blame dbus weirdness for this.