Why not dual boot it since you are getting one OS included and one for free...HDDs are so riduculously large now. Linux is nice but not fully complete when dealing with the rest of the world. Not sure what the Ubuntu load is now but shouldn’t impact your HDD storage concerns. Have you played with any solid state drives yet. Man, those things are fast.
You can do pretty much anything with Linux nowadays.
Yes, this machine is running a solid-state drive, and has since 2009. The main problem with them is a limit on the # of reads/writes per memory location. It's like metal fatigue with a 300,000 or so limit on state changes. Speed, yes, but I sure miss my headroom.