Is my hard drive starting to fail? My MacBook Pro (mid-2012, 16GB, i7 2.3) has started to misbehave:


very slow to start up and shut down
application launches are slow
system becomes nearly unusable when "free" memory approaches zero.


Disk Utility is showing SMART status of the drive as "verified". However, Blackmagic Disk Speed Test is showing a read speed of 27 MB/s and a write speed of 25.7 MB/s. This seems slow to me, though I'm have trouble finding any benchmark values to compare against.

I've run "verify disk" in the Disk Utility app twice. The first time it completed with no errors. The second time the computer froze before the procedure finished.

Here is the system profiler information for the drive.

Capacity:   500.11 GB (500,107,862,016 bytes)
  Model:    APPLE HDD HTS547550A9E384               
  Revision: JE3AD70F
  Serial Number:          J226008BJ65LKC
  Native Command Queuing:   Yes
  Queue Depth:  32
  Removable Media:  No
  Detachable Drive: No
  BSD Name: disk0
  Rotational Rate:  5400
  Medium Type:  Rotational
  Partition Map Type:   GPT (GUID Partition Table)
  S.M.A.R.T. status:    Verified
  Volumes:
disk0s1:
  Capacity: 209.7 MB (209,715,200 bytes)
  BSD Name: disk0s1
  Content:  EFI
Macintosh HD:
  Capacity: 499.25 GB (499,248,103,424 bytes)
  Available:    101.87 GB (101,868,064,768 bytes)
  Writable: Yes
  File System:  Journaled HFS+
  BSD Name: disk0s2
  Mount Point:  /
  Content:  Apple_HFS
  Volume UUID:  BBF6F6B8-26B8-39B4-A206-81471EA7F2B2
Recovery HD:
  Capacity: 650 MB (650,002,432 bytes)
  BSD Name: disk0s3
  Content:  Apple_Boot
  Volume UUID:  DB9ED89F-80DF-3A80-BCC4-58DF1F234256


Does any of this indicate an imminent drive failure? The AppleCare plan for this computer expires in 6 days.
There is no harm in getting a call logged before your apple care expires, although from your description nothing you say would suggest to me that the hard drive is at fault.  It sounds more like the slow build up of unwanted startup items, and inevitable disk fragmentation is just slowing things down, or you could plain be out of memory more often than before.  If you have a secure backup, I might consider a couple of things to test:

1) Create a new user, and see if it is as slow as your usual user account
2) From a complete backup, format your drive and restore to defrag the drive, and again see if the same happens.

HD problems would usually manifest themselves in unusual noises, clicks and whirs, repeated attempts to load a file, genuine errors in log files where you could use the Console app to search for things like "disk0s" "error" and "I/O error" - especially if they correlate in time to the slowness or freezing you are seeing.