Answer by smskelley for File Sharing With Ext4 Partition

It is certainly possible. To my knowledge, Samba doesn't care what file system you're using, just so long as you can read it and mount it. If you setup a Samba share that points to a directory on your esata drive, windows machines will be able to view it without ever having to know that it's formatted ext4.

edit:To provide more information, modifying your /etc/samba/smb.conf is how you would go about creating a share for your esata drive.

As an example, here is a relevant entry in my smb.conf:

[raid]   comment = 4TB Raid5   path = /mnt/raid   public = yes   writable = yes   create mask = 0777   directory mask = 0777   force user = nobody   force group = nogroup

That will create a share named raid that points to the directory /mnt/raid. It doesn't require a username/password, and it's writable.

After making those changes, use sudo service smbd restart to restart the samba server.