Oh, Yes. And if you go with dual-booting: It's not strictly necessary to have 2 discs. Just recommended. While installing an OS (most of them) there would be some feature where you can partition a single disc into multiple portions (i.e. splitting a disc into many drives). Performance-wise it wouldn't make such a big impact since the 2 OSs would not be running at the same time - i.e. the heads on the disc wouldn't constantly sweep back and forth between the 2 portions (partitions).
It's actually a better idea to have the 2 discs split in any case (even with only one OS, no dual-boot) - say have your primary set as the System Disc with all your programs installed. Then you can have the secondary contain your data. The benefit here is that the 2 physical discs can read/write concurrently - making performance a bit better. So on a dual-boot with 2 discs I'd actually partition the primary to hold both OSs (one OS per partition), leave the secondary as a partition formatted with NTFS so both Windows & Ubuntu can read/write to it for data storage.
The Grub thingy is simply a boot-manager installed by Linux (and most other OSs like BSD/Unix). Windows has a similar feature in itself - it just looks different. Though I'd recommend installing Windows first and then Linux - the windows boot manager tends to not work too well with anything but itself. Grub needs hardly any manual settings at all when you install Linux last, it simply checks what is on all your drives / partitions and creates a menu option for each (automatically). The last one installed would overwrite whatever boot-manager is already on your PC.
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