Wow, busy holidays! Hope everyone in the States had a great Thanksgiving!
To answer the question, no I'm not shucking. I'm actually using the drive as is plugged into my home workstation. It's been a great veeam backup location and has all my proxmox vms backed up nicely so far.
I did an intial inspection and it looks like one of the little tabs broke loose in shipping. It was packaged pretty poorly, directly in a larger box without any additional padding. So, it most likely slid around a lot.
Other than that, it is definitely new. I'm going to use it as is (incase I do need to warranty it) and hope for the best.