Follow-up to my last post.
The return was delivered to Zmodo on Monday, 7/10/17. Yesterday I received a replacement ZP-NE14-S w/1TB HDD which appears to be new. I set it up last night and all appears to be working as expected. The only notable physical difference is the HDD. The original unit had a WD Green (Desktop Hard Drive) where the new one has a WD Purple (Surveillance Hard Drive). The new one also includes the MAC address on the box identification label, where the old one did not.
Looking at the FW version using the Zmodo on-line application I see 
Based on the past experience and guessing that this is suggesting a firmware update, I'm a bit reluctant to click on the "Device Version" property with no understanding what that might do.
Impressed with the speed of the return and replacement process. I hope others find Zmodo as easy and accommodating.
I still have a bit of set-up work to complete as time allows, but we appear to be back in business in continuous video logging.
Thank you.