The disclosed technology generally describes a data protection scheme that for “mid-size” objects directly writes divided object data fragments, and performs erasure coding to directly write object coding fragments, to distributed storage locations in a node cluster. A storage container such as a chunk allocated for mid-size objects is distributed among the storage cluster nodes. When a mid-size object (e.g., between 24 megabytes and 128 megabytes) is to be created, the object data is divided into object data fragments and encoded into object coding fragments, with the data object fragments and object coding fragments written/appended to the distributed storage locations, without needing a preliminary protection scheme.