You had me at the 2nd paragraph. I'm also one of those who'll turn around and order a stack of HDD's. Capex is just too high. I find it quite funny that you think 50TB is considered "small amounts of data", but I suppose all is relative.

For a business however (if I had huge amounts of data that needed archiving i.e. >100TB) then I would definitely go the tape route. Or Glacier if I decided to be sensible.