i'm trying out freenas8 for my personal NAS, i have lots of data that was in an ubuntu server, but somehow i never got the file sharing right. on freenas things just worked. i installed on usb, tried sharing the windows disk, and i can see it on my windows 7 right away.

my question is, is it ok to use ext4 fs from my ubuntu instalation ? i only saw zfs, ufs, ntfs, and ext2 option to import, i havent plugged in the disks yet, but im wondering the consequences, like if it asked to format like in windows to use.

i can format the disks of course, but 5-6 TB of data juggling and reformatting is a lot of work, unnecessary work i think, does the zfs worth the trouble of formatting everything ? since i'm thinking to use it if i have to format it anyway and zfs looks more interesting than ext2.