If you are just running one machine, you can run hbase in standalone mode. You don't need HDFS for that.
You can download HBase, set the data location and start it.
Look under tools in the OpenTSDB repo. There is an OSX install script, if you follow that, you should be able to see what to do for a single node installation.
I used these procedures:
http://www.edureka.co/blog/setting-up-a-multi-node-cluster-in-hadoop-2.X
2013/01/hbase-installation-fully-distributed.html