Have I got a defective drive?

I wouldn’t do it…  The drive order is important to the RAID mapping.  

If the drive is bad, then it must be SO bad that it’s hanging up the system instead of just doing a recovery on the drive.

If you have the capability, try putting the drive in your PC via a SATA cable and run a diagnostic on it.

If the diagnostic comes out bad, have the drive (just the HDD) replaced under warranty.

If the diagnostic comes out good, then wipe out ALL of the partitions.  Just leave it as an unpartitioned / unformatted drive.

Shut down the MBLD, reinsert the disk in the correct bay, and power it back up and see.

If it STILL doesn’t work, then perhaps the SATA interface on the chassis is bad, and you’re better of exchanging the whole box, drives and all.