lol,no no,i was using my new HDD on a raid-0 port,and even then it was still working but sometimes it would just turn off. And the problem was with the HDD as it turned out,i bought a brand new sata 6gb/s HDD later after that and am using it on sata 3.0 port now with the same wire. The wire was brand new....wel barely used a few months,came with my asrock extreme 3 gen 3 and i never used it untill recently.
Point is,cable is fine,im still using it,there is nothing in it.
And try to put the hard disk IN the casing first,then put in the wire,it probably wont feel "tight" but it should work fine.
Try this HDD alone as the primary one.