Hard drive issues with early 2011 13" please help!

Hello everyone,
I'm new here but I need immediate help! I'll try to make the story somewhat short:
I have a macbook pro early 2011 13".
- Closed my lid one day (I did not make any changes or installed anything new recently) and upon reopening many hours later, the system was frozen.
- Did a hard shut off and upon turning it on, I get the crossed out circle.
- Recovery HD also gave me the same crossed out circle.
- Used internet recovery and formatted/partitioned the drive.
(Note that the drive in the bay at the moment is a Kingston HyperX SSD, not the OEM Samsung HD as I am actually using that as my secondary hard drive in my CD drive bay, which has been working fine the entire time before and during everything)
- Tried to reinstall Lion from internet recovery but it wouldn't detect the SSD.
- Strange, so I decided to install Lion onto an external hard drive and installed Mavericks onto the internal drive from there, successfully too.
- Same results (crossed out circle) upon booting into the internal drive (likewise for the recovery HD).
- I pulled out the drive and popped it into an enclosure and it could boot up from there.
- Took it a step further and purchased an additional SSD, partitioned it and installed Mavericks on it via the external hard drive (not the SSD in the enclosure)
- I can boot up from the new SSD, however it is extremely sluggish and freezes every few seconds with the spinning beach ball.
I am about to reinstall a newly downloaded copy of Mavericks onto the new SSD to see if it will fix the issue (which I doubt)
Could it be a problem with the drives or is it the SATA cable that is malfunctioning?
I'm not sure whether or not it is worth spending so much time repairing it because I've already spent a good three or four days getting this far.
Are the parts, repairs, hard drive replacements worth it or should I just replace it?

Did you format the external drive for use with OS X?
Open Disk Utility. Does Disk utility see the connected drive?
Format it to "Mac OS Extended (Journaled).

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