Hello,

I recently bought an ASUS X553M laptop, and just within a few minutes of first booting it, I started hearing these clicking noises coming from the HDD-compartment.
After doing some googling I found out about this sort of clicking being due to APM-issues, but most of it left me confused because

a) Lots of people say that the clicking is only once every few minutes or so, for me it comes every few seconds, sometimes several clicks within one second.

b) None of the methods for turning off APM has worked for me whatsoever, which I figure might be because they're mainly for up to Win 7, whereas I have Win 8.1.

The only thing that makes the click go away is doing an error scan of the drive, or whenever something is reading from the drive at 90-100% (according to task manager). As soon as those processes are complete, it comes back again.

A recording of the noise: http://vocaroo.com/i/s15wIKkh6q1r

I'm a bit hesitant to turn it in under warranty, because they'll want to examine it, and if it turns out it isn't an error but just APM or something similiar, I'll have to pay the service charge anyway.
The drive works fine otherwise, the clicking just drives me insane. It doesn't show very well in the clip, but it's VERY audible, even if watching TV or youtube clips on max volume.