It has been a long time. But the good news is that you're lucky and will be skipping hard drives entirely. The need to spin rust in a circle to record digital data has been obviated by the development and promulgation of Secure Digital "flash" storage. Which is to say, most all of the new recorders used by members of this website record to SD cards.
If you're new to SecureDigital (SD) cards, the most modern version is currently the SDXC [eXtended Capacity, specs announced January 2009] which can go up to 2TB on a card, and someday we will look back and laugh at how expensive it was when it came out. The version before SDXC is called SDHC [High Capacity, announced January 2006] and they go up to 32GB.
There are plenty of good recorders which were made before the SDXC cards came out, for instance, I saw a DR-40 (not the newer X version) on sale for a hundred bucks the other day.
As for the deck, now that you understand the general parameters, would you want something small and two-channeled, or might you utilize 4 channels or more if you had them?
If you require XLR input rather than 1/8" mini input, that will exclude many of the smallest units.
Hope this is instructive for you and helpful and not just #captainObvious material.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SD_card#SDIO,_SDHC,_and_SDXC