Frugally (legally) obtained HDDs are still going to cost you a lot of money, there is no way around that at the moment. If you need it, pay up and be done with it. If you just kind of want it, start sorting through your piles of data you don't actually need (yes, you have that, stop lying to yourself) to free up space for things you do actually need.
Since a physical copy would undoubtedly require day one updates to just work properly, you would just end up with an unplayable physical copy If they decide to not make these updates available.
It's doesn't actually use those 7GB when idling though, it just allocates it so it's directly available if it needs it. It will free up ram from its allocated amount if other processes require ram.
That seems pretty obvious no? Whether or not people that shouldn't have had access to this data have accessed it. Even if they have the data showing whether or not it happened, it still takes time to go through it because they collect insane amounts on their employees.
Frugally (legally) obtained HDDs are still going to cost you a lot of money, there is no way around that at the moment. If you need it, pay up and be done with it. If you just kind of want it, start sorting through your piles of data you don't actually need (yes, you have that, stop lying to yourself) to free up space for things you do actually need.