using ACFS without ASM instance

Hi there, I am really new to ASM - just trying to understand the basic concepts-

We have created some databases which we were planning managing the storage with ASM, however for time constraints we ended not creating the ASM instance and creating regular datafiles using the storage device

setup to have the ASM disks/groups, now these databases are really slow, could this be the cause? here the location of the datafiles and the storage device info:

SQL> select distinct substr(NAME,1,14) FROM V$DATAFILE;

/u02/acfsdata/

SQL> !df -h /u02/acfsdata

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on