Somebody has a clue how to fix this???

This Maxtor DiamondMax 32049H2 (20 Gb) was running fine on a PIII/W98 PC... suddenly started to fail (blue screens... a lot). I took the drive out of the PC and ran some tests... and one thing I realize is when the drive is "cold" (room temp) all tests pass OK, but when the drive is running for a while and reaches about 34-38°C it starts to fail... long seek times (really slow...), bad sectors, freeze, etc., so I have to put a fan to cool it (I mean literally a 16" desk fan blowin ON it...) and automatically the drive heals!. I´ve found one of the SMD chips gets more hot than the others in the PCB... is a Lucent MS253B6... Could this be the problem?? What would you recommend?? I'd like to do all I can before smash it against the floor!!

Tks !!!!!