sounds like a termination issue.
Try this, boot off a floppy, or the internal HD, then once the machine is up, open up Drive Setup, hook-up the external SCSI device(I use to hot swap SCSI drives all the time, never burnt one out), then re-scan the SCSI bus(es) in Drive Setup. Have you tried only one external device, or more? Oh yeah... and don't forget to try 2, or 3 different SCSI cables too just to verify it's not the cable.