NewEgg has a 500GB, 7200.4 SATA 2.5" drive on sale for $50 with free shipping. I'm going to grab one of those and install:
Debian 32
Debian 64
Fedora 32
Fedora 64
Ubuntu (or since I'll be using the KDE interface anyway Kubuntu) 32
Ubuntu 64
- And maybe one or two more.
I assume I format the 32-bit partitions in the EXT3 and the 64-bit partitions in EXT4, yes? I'm still not clear about which file system the Linux cores requires HD's be formatted in and the info I'm finding online is old and suggest EXT2.
Is there a limit to the number of partitions I can create or make use of in Linux distros? At this point I'm looking at about 6 to 8 and maybe one just to hold my personal files.

David