Hello 1389 here,
We have been ditching the short data cables and we are now using this ribbon cable:
http://www.digikey.com/product-detai...100-ND/3867658
And these ends:
http://www.digikey.com/product-detai...645-ND/3883465
Just make sure that you orient the ends the same way that the data cable ends are or else the encoders will not get power. (We went through a lot of debugging before we figured this out)
Hope this was helpful