After my initial searches for the classic style Macs, it seems that one model, the SE/30 comes to the forefront because of the 68030 processor and 128meg upgradability for the RAM.
I was looking for something inexpensive (around $100 to $150) and sometimes I come across a non-working SE/30 that falls into this price range. Now I am a technician so I can solder and service PCB's to a certain degree, however I am not familiar with the common failure nodes of the Mac SE/30. I would like to know what are the more common problems that occur with the SE/30.

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The most common failure we're currently reading about in the forums for the SE/30 is leaking electrolytic capacitors on the logic board causing what is termed sisami-Mac (not sure I spelled that right), which is powering on to a sort of checkerboard pattern and failing to boot. The repair for this ranges from removing the old caps (11 SMs, and 2 axials) cleaning the board and replacing the caps, to the former plus repairing damaged pins, solder, traces and/or vias which may have been corroded by the leakage from the electrolytics.

The need for serious board repair is not common, but also not unheard of. If you can trace a connection and bypass it with wire wrap, this also should present little trouble for you.

The other common failure modes involve the components on the Analog board or in the power supply, but I'm not sure if this was common at all on the SE/30. Failed analog boards were common in the Mac Plus, which has fairly similar circuitry, but for the SE and SE/30 Apple added a fan and beefed up many of the components, which reduced the cause of failure. Those components are not difficult to find either, except for the flyback transformer. They used to be commonly available, but I cannot find a source for new flyback transformers anywhere any more. They might be out there, but I haven't found them.

If you can find an inexpensive copy (or check it out at a library) Larry Pina's book, "Macintosh Repair and Upgrade Secrets" can tell you more about failing and repairing SE analog boards and power supplies (SE shares analog board and power supply with SE/30). Also see, "The Dead Mac Scrolls" and "Mac Classic & SE: Repair and Upgrade Secrets".

I would figure that hard drive failures also rank the top of the leader board as well. Are the hard drives in these machines easily replaced?
Other things I would like to know for this particular model:

1) Is the RAM still easy to come by?

2) What kind of printer did the SE/30 use?

3) What expansion capabilities did this computer have?

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The hard drives are standard 50 pin SCSI hard drives. If you can get the machine open, they're not horrible to replace, but it's not like working on a nice desktop case either. And one must be careful not to break the neck of the CRT. You can also use a SCSI-to-IDE adapter and install a common IDE drive or even a laptop drive. One example is the Acard 7720U which used to be available for about $40 shipped on Ebay but seems to be more expensive now.

If the hard drive is not an Apple branded drive, you'll need either a third party formatting utility or a hacked version of Apple's formatting utility. Neither is especially hard to find.

RAM is standard 30 pin SIMMs. They're ancient but not especially rare. Eight 16MB SIMMs could easily cost $80 but you may find them for $60 with some patience. If you're happy with 8 MB, 1 MB SIMMs are practically free and 4 MB SIMMs are not especially pricey either, taking you to 32 MB, which realistically, is enough for most reasonable use of the SE/30.

The ROM (firmware, or BIOS) of the SE/30 is not 32 bit clean (defaults to 24 bit addressing) so it does not support more than 8 MB of RAM (24 bit addressing yields 16M of address space, and some of it is used for I/O) unless you install a utility called Mode32. Alternatively, you can find a ROM SIMM from a Mac IIfx or Mac IIsi and install that to obtain 32 bit capable firmware.

The printer is a big topic. Printer connectivity is through the Mini-DIN8 serial ports. There is no parallel port. A variety of serial printers were available. How common they would be today, I do not know.

Apple's LaserWriter extension (print driver) outputs Postscript. So you can use most postscript printers if you can manage connectivity to them. Many older printers (and a few new ones still) supported LocalTalk (a network media). The serial ports on Macs were actually combined serial and LocalTalk ports, depending on how you configured them. So, for example, you can find many old HP JetDirect cards with LocalTalk or Ethernet & LocalTalk support. Epson also made some LocalTalk cards for their printers.

Alternatively, you can get a LocalTalk to Ethernet bridge. These were sold under names such as Asante's MicroAsantePrint, AsanteTalk, and similar products from Dayna and Farallon. This will bridge from LocalTalk to ethernet, but the network protocol will still be AppleTalk, so you'll need a printer than understands AppleTalk over ethernet (sometimes called EtherTalk).

Finally, the SE/30 has a PDS slot and ethernet cards for that PDS slot are not terribly rare, though not as common as they once were. At some point Apple added printing via TCP/IP to the options, but I'm not sure if the operating system where that was first added overlaps with the operating systems that the SE/30 can use.

Oh, and that ties in nicely to your number 3. The SE/30 has one internal PDS slot. It can take the ethernet card, or various (fairly rare) video boards, or a CPU accelerator, or a combination of the above with the proper splitter/adapter/ethernet card-with-pass-through. Google up "Gamba SE/30" and there's a load of information on expansion possibilities.