bad internal cable? hybrid drive and macbook pro

Oh boy I've had a doozy of a month trying to figure out how to get my

Macbook Pro Late 2011

2.2 GHz Intel Core i7

16 GB 1333 MHz DDR3

back in action.

After my internal hybrid drive failed, and wouldn't boot, seemingly with a bad sector or two, I went ahead and got Seagate to send me a replacement drive.

It's more or less this one:

http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Solid-Hybrid-2-5-Inch-ST1000LM014/dp/B00B99JUBQ/

Maddeningly, this DID work for about a week. And then, suddenly, my Carbon Copy Clone onto that brand new drive would not boot. I couldn't bless the startup disk. Spinning wheel on grey for hypnotizing hours. Etc. However, that same hard drive would indeed boot from an external enclosure.

I tried everything, repaired permissions, Diskwarrior, Safe Boot, Internet Recovery and install of new OS. Everything one would do. I then erased and reformatted the drive and re-installed the OS. No go. Spinning wheel. But, again, boots from external.

Which led me to think that the problem could be the internal hard drive cable.

So I ordered one from amazon. When it arrived I noticed that the part number was different than the one currently in there. They sent me

821-0989-A and the part in my macbook pro was 821-1198-A

So. Onward. They reassured me that the cable was compatible. Again my hybrid drive with the clean install would not boot, and in fact this time around I was met with the flashing folder with question mark, which was new. Booting from a seperate external this time the internal drive was not even "seen" by disk utility. So that was weird. And I assumed the cable was also defective.

HOWEVER, out of frustration and curiosity I sent ahead and put in my old, not hybrid, came with the macbook pro, drive. It booted internally. That was a first. And further, I put in my old hard drive with the old cable... that did not boot.

One last side note/caveat... When booting to the old cable in safe mode, I did receive an on screen kernal panic message, as opposed to the wheel spinning endlessly.

Ok.

So I'm trying to figure out what to do next, after a month of dealing with this.

Should I:

buy a non-hybrid internal drive and use the replacement cable I received (I need a 1tb internal drive, I do a lot of video/music work)

attempt to get the "proper" hard drive cable, perhaps from my local Apple Store?

I'm just tired of dealing with it. I may be stubborn, but my inclination is to replace the hard drive CABLE again, with the "proper" cable. My (uneducated) guess would be that the newer internal cables could handle hybrid drive transfer rates and that the one I was sent indeed is "compatible" but not able to handle hybrid drives. I did appreciate the jump in performance.

However I'd really appreciate your insight into whether this hellish month is a result of the hybrid drive itself.

Argh.

Thank You.