Selective use of a software path and hardware path help to provide fine-grained T10-PI support while maintaining IO operation efficiency for single IO read/write commands transferring multiple data segments. NVMe hardware capability (i.e. the hardware path) is always utilized for CPU-intensive CRC verification. NVMe hardware capability is utilized for application tag and reference tag verification whenever possible. Software running on a computing node (i.e. the software path) is used for application tag and reference tag verification and replacement when those functions cannot be implemented by the NVMe hardware.