Will only support one USB drive at a time

Background
This is happening with a Mid 2007 Mini, OS X 10.7.4.
I use this Mini soley as an iTunes music server. The OS is on the internal drive. Music is on a separate drive, as is Time Machine. No keyboard is connected. I do all maintence wirelessly via screen sharing from another Mac.
Recently I changed the drives from conventional ext. FW hard drives to ext USB SSD. The USB enclosures are USB2/3 "Hornet" brand. The SSDs are Samsung 256GB 830s.
The Problem
Only one USB drive will stay mounted at a time. Both drives will initially mount but once one is put into use, i.e., play a song or start a Time Machine update, the other drive will unmount and I get the nasty "You disconnected your USB drive improperly...." I've seen the threads on USB drives randomly unmounting. This is not that issue. My drives do not randomly unmount; one will unmount as soon as the other is in use. (The unmounted drive stays unmounted. It does not remount when the other drive is no longer in use).
The drives came with USB cables that had dual ends, one for data/power the other power only. The problem occurs regardless of whether I use just the data/power or both.
My initial thoughts are:
1) It's a power issue and the Mini can't support the power requirements of both drives simulateously. I need an A/C adapter.
2) It's an incompatible enclosure (even though it said Mac compatible, who knows if it was actually tested and not just presumed).
3) Crappy cables.
The Question
Since testing any of these hypothesis will cost me $ (and time to buy -- and return if unsuccesful) I'm hoping someone here has experienced something similar to guide me to the fix a bit quicker. Am I close here, or could it be something else?

I believe Bus powered drives are for the birds, & more often a problem on Macs than PCs, get a good AC powered USB hub... or two.

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