Thanks!
It didn’t work though 
But I think I might know why?
I double checked. Both www-data and nginx are in the aslan user group. And the work folder has 777 permissions.
BUT! the full address is /media/aslan/work and both media and aslan are both root user and group. So I think that’s probably the problem. I don’t think I should expose /media to non root users (since that’s what USB drives mount to automatically) so I think I just need to remount the work drive to a dedicated location in /. I’ll try that and get back to ya’ll.
EDIT: BINGO! That worked 