Hi Jared
The issue doesn’t appear to be just Nikon-related, like yourself I too own a Canon 60D and I’m seeing the same behaviour with it.
I did a bit more testing last night, all done with the 60D and no memory card.
First I tested the speed of each of my Netbook’s USB slots. I then compared the transfer speeds to those I was getting on my powerful desktop computer, and saw no difference. So the Netbook’s USB slots are definitely operating at full USB2.0 speeds.
I then fired off some Raw exposures with the other Astro software I’ve used in the past, and timed how long it took for each one to appear in the download folder. Each 19MB CR2 file was taking about 7 to 8 secs to appear, which sounds similar to the speeds you are seeing on your machine.
I then fired off some similar Raw exposures using SGP. I also analysed the download folder and saw that on average, each 19MB CR2 file was taking about 25 secs to appear, followed by the Image Analysis time which tended to fluctuate from anywhere between 5 to 10 secs.
I’m comfortable with the Image Analysis time, but how come the pure transfer time itself is so much longer? (7s Vs 25s). This is the source of my main gripe (not the necessity of using Raw files for Focusing, PlateSolving etc) as at the moment it means I am wasting a lot of time between frames. If we can get it sorted then I would be happy to use SGP for my Flats and avoid the need to use the memory card at all. Plus it would have the obvious benefit of enabling me to capture more Lights in the same timeframe.
Cheers,
Ciarán.