Can you even buy 500 GB HDDs these days? I can get 1tb drives from my local Officeworks for $63AUD, but that’s pretty uneconomical when you can get 10tb drives for $360AUD.

Get the largest SSD you can, and buy a HDD later on when you can afford it. You can get slight discounts on HDDs by buying external hard drives and “Shucking” them (removing the casing and using the disk inside). You may need to do some research to work out if it’s possible for the drive you want to buy though, not all are shuckable