Hello & welcome, v0idnull !
But this requires lots of space, and I don't believe I can use an SD Card higher than 4gb with CHDK and my Canon SD1000, so my question is can I just snap photos straight over USB and bypass the card altogether? This would be fantastic for say, 24 hour time lapse photography, all in RAW.
There are some experimental functions to transfer images directly through an USB connection with the PTP protocol, but this is not available for the SD1000 atm...
You could do it with a script & the Windows WIA mechanism, e.g. like described
here...
It should also be possible with an
Eye-fi SD card, but they are slow, expensive and also not very reliable...
But you should be able to use cards > 4GB !
The SD1000 is SDHC capable, you should be able to use CHDK on big (e.g. 8GB) SDHC cards.
--> Format the card in the camera, copy the CHDK files & start CHDK with the "Firmware Update" menu item...
The CHDK version for the SD1000 has multipartition support, so the autostart loading method should also work (with a prepared, partitioned SD card).
BTW - IMO you don't need RAW files or the highest image resolution 
