Git is one of the most extensible, light-weight and efficient source code management frameworks I have had the pleasure of working with. It promotes iterative development by allowing cheap and easy creation of branches on the client side while efficiently managing resources on the server side.
While working with larger codebases, there may be a couple of tricks you can employ to make it easier to manage git’s disk footprint. For one, you can reduce the history of the git workspace that you clone on disk:
git clone --depth 1 http://git.url.here
This will clone the git repository as a shallow clone with a history depth of just one object. There are limitations with this setup though; one cannot clone nor fetch from it or push from nor into it. But this adequate if one just wishes to work on a change on the top of the tree.
There are other clone options that may be applicable in your case which are referenced in the git clone manual.