A General Question about Linux on Mac

Hello to all!

I'm thinking about buying parts of a MacBook Pro from eBay and making myself a better Linux machine than my current laptop. The specific one I'm looking at will need a new keyboard and hard drive, but otherwise has no physical issues. The keyboards are cheap enough, so my only concern is I don't really want to shell out the dough for an Apple hard drive. I know OS X requires certain hardware to function, but if I'm not going to be running OS X on the laptop at all, do I need the special Apple hard drives, or could I just get any SATA drive that fits?

Thanks!