Sudden lag accompanied by scary, loud noises.

My Macbook Pro started experiening what I call "sudden lag" where applications don't want to open, browsers load slowly, and everything more or less comes to a halt without actually freezing. Just as soon as I had noticed this and begun to get curious it started making loud noises that I can only describe as sounding like rapid fire from a machine gun. When this happened I was running VMware, opening Firefox, had Chrome downloading a file, and had several other applications going. After a quick internet search it seems like various people (mainly people with older iMacs, from a couple years back) had problems like this, too, but no one ever figured out what was going on. As of right now my mac is working alright, lag is gone, and the noise stopped after I closed it (goes into lock mode upon closing) and moved it as far back on my desk and away from my person as possible. I seriously thought it was going to explode or something! This is not the first problem I've had with this Mac.

About six months after getting it I had a case of that "sudden lag" followed by a total crash. The hard drive had failed and had to be replaced. Before this happened it had begun to run a bit slower than normal, but I hadn't thought anything of it.

Some time passed and I began to have another problem. My computer took forever to come out of lock-mode or sleep and would sometimes freeze, shut down again, or go into lock several times before I could get the lock screen to respond. This was accompanied by spontaenous black screens where my computer would lock suddenly while I was still actively using the computer. Not just watching something, moving the mouse, browsing the internet, loading pages, etc...

More recently, I noticed I was having some odd problems with my outlets. My Mac has been named the "cord destroyer" because I have had 3 HDMI cables die immediately after being used with it, never to work again. One of them actually sparked! Fortunately that seems to have stopped and it hasn't destroyed anymore HDMI cables. However, my previous wall charger cable had begun to warp and change colors at the end that connects to my Mac. I thought that was a bit odd. In addition, I have been getting a "Service Battery" notification from my macbook. I'm going to do the logical thing and take it in, tell all this to the genius bar people, but last time I was there they honestly didn't know what to tell me and I'm wondering if anyone else has had an experience like this? If so, did you ever figure out what was wrong?

As a side note, when I went to start a back up to my external hard drive, is said that my previous one was from a different computer— but it was done with this computer, post-hard drive crash. Nothing has changed since then to my knowledge. Thought that was odd as well. 😟

Do I have the Macbook Pro from heck or what? I think I'm still under warantee until June, so at least there's that!

Computer Specs:

Macbook Pro 13" Mid 2012

Processor: 2.5 GHz Intel Core i5

Memory: 16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3 (upgraded at home w/o voiding warrantee)

Graphics: Intel HD Graphics 4000 512 MB

Software: OS X 10.8.5

Note: I'm pretty certain that I had been using the same home-upgraded RAM at the time of the first Hard Drive crash, and I'm still using it.

Is there any chance that it might be to blame for some of this craziness?