I'm not entirely sure what to do with this drive when it arrives because on one hand I need to make sure it works so some testing will be required (probably more testing than just plugging it in and reading a disc), and on the other hand I want the drive to last as long as possible. Any suggestions?
Last as long as possible could mean that it reads as many discs as possible, or that you store it in optimal conditions so that it reads as few discs as possible, but remains viable for reading discs as many years into the future as possible.
For the former, don't put in discs that seem imbalanced, whether from the factory or some sticker on them or whatever, that make it vibrate or a lot of noise/wear on the mechanism. Don't situate it near hot running (passively cooled w/o air intake in front of them) HDD(s) as this slight heat difference isn't much but it's not going to help.
Manage dust levels in the room and in the PC itself, don't have a negatively pressurized PC case so it is drawing dusty air into the drive, nor positively pressurized without dust filter in place so it isn't blowing dusty air
out of the optical drive.
For the later to increase # years viability, pack it away in a low humidity, cool temperature environment, sealed in opaque packaging so it does not get exposed to an infinite amount of oxygen, UV, or dust. It might be nearly in this state in the retail packaging but it might only have a sticker seal holding the bag flap down instead of completely air-tight seal. Some silica gel packets in the bag to soak up moisture could help if not in a very dry environment when sealed shut.
The mechanical portions of the drive are not such that they need "exercised" over time. Wear from use is still wear, but if you never use it then there was no point having it. Worse would be keeping it in a PC that is running a lot of hours but then not using that drive, so it suffers the environmental aging without serving any purpose. Use it or pack it for long term storage.
EEPROM firmware is another long term factor but i don't have sufficient data to tell you whether it's going to be closer to 15 years retention or 100 years. Someone with a mission critical need for a device's firmware might reflash that firmware every decade or so. Once a device loses the firmware it is a much more laborious process with a learning curve and equipment needed to reflash it, rather than just running a firmware update app on the host PC/system. You'd also want to make sure a firmware flasher app download contains the actual firmware as most do, not pulling it from a cloud server when you run that app, since clouds don't exist *forever*.
Some people might pursue a different strategy for a BR video collection backup and use, get what they can online, already ripped and re-encoded to a reasonable bit rate for manageable file size storage. Depending on the specifics of doing so, that may or may not be legal in any particular country.
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