My advise would be to buy a notebook with an SSD(Solid state drive).You will find your notebook will run much cooler as there will be NO moving parts in the drive.
If you want a hard disk drive buy a USB backup drive.That way you have plenty of storage.
These days you can buy a 1TB SSD for 300.00.Thats a lot of storage right there.
I just put a 500GB SSD in my 2010 MacBook Pro and it is lightning fast now.
You *absolutely* must religiously back up an SSD. When an SSD fails, it’s like flipping a switch: one moment you have data, the next moment you have none, and none is recoverable.