How does it hurt to use Linux (Ubuntu) as a guest OS for all my tasks?

Programmer Question

I have a machine running Windows, where the disk has two partitions C (50 GB) and D (250GB).
I do research in Information Retrieval and need to work with a large corpus (more than 50 GB) and in Linux.

So if I want to install Linux on the existing system, keeping the Windows installation intact, will it be fine to run it in a virtual box? (say, QEMU, VMWare, etc.)

An alternative is using Wubi. In that case the Linux installation has to be on drive C. Then, if I keep a small Linux installation (say 5GB) on C, and my corpus on D (mounted in Linux), how will it affect the performance of my programs which would be accessing the mounted Windows drive D.

Is it feasible to use Linux this way? Which of the above is better if at all they are a way out?

Find the answer here