While Intel is still a little ways away from launching the Haswell series of CPUs and their chipsets, information has already surfaced about the 9-Series chipset, the chipset that will be released accordingly with the successor to the Haswell CPUs, the Broadwell CPUs.
What is known is that the Broadwell CPUs will also drop into the LGA1150 socket, just like the upcoming Haswell CPUs. From the information that has emerged, the 9-Series chipsets will come in two versions: the Z97, aimed at enthusiasts and power users; and the H97, aimed at the mainstream consumer. The systems will support both Haswell and Broadwell CPUs, making the transition from Haswell to Broadwell look remarkably similar as that from Sandy Bridge to Ivy Bridge.
What's most remarkable about the 9-Series chipsets is that they will feature the upcoming SATA Express standard. While there is no information about how many of these connectors the 9-Series boards will have, it is definitely a warmly welcomed upgrade seen as modern SSDs are not far away from saturating the SATA3 standard.
The SATA Express standard will feature a bandwidth from 10 to 16 Gb/s.
But idk. Probably the only thing that'll make me stop with a Haswell purchase is DDR4 support for Broadwell, but i don't think that's happening. Not buying before december, so should have more details on the 9-series by then.
If you want DDR4 on the desktop, you will have to wait for Broadwell (14nm shrink next year if all goes well) for that.
Just about all of them. SATA1 spec is only good for ~150MB/s, and while things like file transfers of small documents will be slower than that, anything moved that is bigger than an MP3, or transfered in a way other than a windows file transfer can go well above that very easily. Even SATA2 is easily saturated with mid-level SSDs. On my own rig I have Agility 3's and while their average speed sits right around the throughput of SATA2, if you give them compressible data then even they can max out the SATA3 spec with relative ease for reading files (ie loading programs or editing video).
There is a lot of work that needs to be done to get SSDs to have more consistent fast performance, but it is good to know that some 2 years from now then we will be able to have the performance roof lifted again!
It is nice to see that Haswell is benching better than expected numbers, and that Broadwell will probably see a good standards increase (DDR4, SATA4 are expected, but we may also see next gen Thunderbolt come to play as well). I'm still waiting on Skylake/Skymont for my next upgrade just due to my own upgrade cycle, but it is nice to see that Intel is not sacrificing everything on the alter of better power efficiency and that they are working on other areas of development.