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Personally I draw the line at 120-200 gigabytes as my risk line. Anything smaller is difficult to find working. And SSDs with a SATA to pata adaptor takes care of it on the buyers end.
2,8,10,12,20,25, and 40 gig drives tend to be the sweet spot on 95/98. Up to about 200 gig. Those I sell as full systems (and cross my fingers with insurance forms in hand).
You can regularly find 80-200 gig drives new and used on Amazon and ebay in the $80-$120 range.

Hard drives under 2 gig I sell on their own. They can be worth more than the computer they’re in. Especially the sub 100 MEGABYTE original ISA drives which are several hundreds of dollars each.

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-- my grades are my own and do not represent an offer from boardsort, nor are they guaranteed. Please keep that in mind.

I'm not sure but I think maybe you misunderstood my question so let me try rephrasing...

Bc it's risky selling/shipping the computer with hard drive intact do these vintage computers still have decent market value if I sell without a hard drive

Yep, I misunderstood. Without the drive Anything from the Pentium/586 era on to the core era start around $25 not including shipping. Hard drive doesn’t add much value here; another $5 or $10 if at all, and it looks to be a working OS value, not the drive, that’s the value add. A blank hdd adds nothing.

Anything older than that like 486 and 386 etc are literally all over the place. Ebay shows auction sales from under $20 to many hundreds.

Core 2 era appears to be where values start climbing again.

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-- my grades are my own and do not represent an offer from boardsort, nor are they guaranteed. Please keep that in mind.

I keep going back and forth on what to do here...I've got five machines all running Windows 95. All running either Pentium or Pentium 2. The exact models (a Compaq, a couple Packard Bells Legend series...cant recall the others offhand) have sold on ebay for $100-$150 fairly recently. Half the fun is having that hard drive in there because you get the old OS with it (and the AOL 3.0 free trial - woot). But I'm so worried I'm going to sell $500-$600 worth of machines and then have the harddrives die in transit and then be screeewed.

ARRRRGGGGHHH

Packard Bell computers tend to be a bit priced than others. legend was a lower quality compatible.
I also tend to stay very conservative on my pricing. If I Tomas you a Pentium MMX Packard Bell for $800 and you got $80 for it you’d be after me on that discrepancy.
Beyond the basic sales stuff, some processors will get far more than others. Pentium MMX chips, and overdrive drop ins. AMD k6/2 and KIII/K6III. Winchip 586 drop in replacements.
The scrap market targets AMD k5 and K6 CPUs for thick gold caps. Anything with EDO ram is also a tech dream. And those systems have a premium as well. There’s a lot that goes into the valuation of a system, more than these threads allow me to lay out.
Look up the models on ebay and use refine to search out SOLD values. Just make sure when you DO ship complete working systems you have the shipper insure it. Than you’re protected.

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-- my grades are my own and do not represent an offer from boardsort, nor are they guaranteed. Please keep that in mind.

Sold prices on the models I have is what I was referencing...$100-$150 were typical SOLD prices. I got them for free so I'm not looking to get rich off of them more so I would rather sell them quickly. But it sounds like full system is the best way to go, insure it and deal with insurance claims later if needed.

id go half price sell ''as is'' and list everything you know about it if it where me...but that is me....and as me .... the whole procese of selling stuff on online becomes more trouble than it worth when you stress over it to much

Well said! Exactly. Look up the models, see what they sell to. Decided if the drive is worth the potential headache.
Sell it. Ship it insured. And presto done-o.

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-- my grades are my own and do not represent an offer from boardsort, nor are they guaranteed. Please keep that in mind.