What are the ramifications of recursively chown'ing the directories on an external drive that currently has 501:dialout or root:root permissions?

I have a Raspberry Pi that is running a Raspbmc circulation and also I've seen that a great deal of the directory sites are either possessed by the customer 501 and also the team dialout or both the customer and also team root. It is discouraging for me to relocate documents from the major filesystem on the SD card to the exterior drive due to the fact that I constantly require origin accessibility (and also it makes automating jobs a discomfort also), so I 'd actually such as to be able to chown it to the customer pi. I've studied a little on what the 501 customer and also the dialout team are and also do not see why I should not do this, yet my expertise of Unix permissions is standard at ideal so I would certainly such as to recognize if I've missed out on any kind of factors to consider prior to I proceed and also transform the permissions recursively on the whole drive.

So my inquiry would certainly be: Is there any kind of injury in doing a chown -R pi on the exterior drive?