Our second Mac ever was a Power Macintosh 6500/250, we got it with the 17" display, and Color StyleWriter 4100, all brand new, I think it totaled $3000 or something, and of course a few months later Beige G3s came out > I still have all of it here. I even got an old OS X version running on it.

As for the hard drive. Mine came with a Quantum 4 GB which failed after about 4 years of use. I replaced it with a Seagate 40 GB and it was noticeably faster booting up and loading applications. So go ahead and drop in a newer hard drive, it will help.