How best to set up a separate /home partition, and pros/cons

[John D. Herron]

Hi, all.

Currently running Ubuntu Natty pre-installed on a stand-alone machine 
(Dual-core AMD Athlon 255, 4 GB RAM, 1TB HDD).

Since I have a lot of unused disk space I'd like to add and try out some 
other distros (Linux Mint 13, Zorin OS, ...).

In order to keep things 'streamlined' (i.e. to avoid unnecessary 
duplications) I'm looking into setting up a separate /home partition to 
serve the future distros as well.

Is this a reasonable idea? If so, how should I best go about it?

By the way: i'm aware that Natty is no longer supported and intend to 
upgrade to (or new-install) the latest LTS version.

Thanks for your help and/or comments.
john