depends on the type of HDD.
1. Is it SATA or IDE? SATA has a write speed of of up to 3.0gb/s, IDE has 133mbps (I think need to verify)
2. Cache size, current standard seems to be 8 or 16 mb, what s cache?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cache
3. speed. 10,000 rpm's is the max it seems, but generally 7200rpm is standard.
Also that board could be ebayed for $20 or so. It's at the end of its lifespan as a desktop pc, it still can be used as a server motherboard.
In any case it's best if you do a clean re-install of your o/s. a 40 gig hdd shouldn't be a nightmare to burn to dvd (You'll probably only have 20 gig or so of data, everything else will be xp files or app data)
Also, I'm sure there are better deals out there, unfortunately newegg and tigerdirect are the only places I know of. as a general rule AMD for tight budgets (processors and motherboards are cheaper) Intel Core2Duo for mid range and higher. And when I meant the motherboad was dead, all I meant was the technology on that board was not being developed anymore. (DDR Ram, AGP)
have a look around tomshardware.com or anandtech.com, I used those sites to scope a budget gaming rig.