The details may be of some interest:
The 50GB folder (with fragmented files of various types and sizes) is sitting on a mid-2015 MBP 2.8 GHz i7 with 500GB SSD. The thumb drive is a garden variety of 64GB Lexar™
What settings allow best transfer?
Bluetooth on/off; Wifi on/off; Screen on/off; USB port right/left; etc. Is there anything I should do first to prepare the files for better transfer. For example, I would de-frag a hard drive before a data-transfer in the olden-days when computers were steam powered.
… Or, does it matter since the bottleneck is the USB flash drive?