I found some hard to get (for decent price) cables on ebay and they just came in, I can now use the external drives. Vhdci to hdci cables are getting hard to find. They were always obscure. I have a sinking feeling that high quality scsi cables with odd gender changes (vhdci to hd50 centrics) will be a good thing to stock up on.
Yeah, I had to hunt for a little bit to find cables for my Katana unit last year for a reasonable price. The problem is, a lot of the older SCSI connectors haven't been in production for years, and only about two companies in the world ever made them to begin with. You can't make a cable if you can't source the connectors.