Systems and methods may provide for receiving a scatter/gather list that identifies a contiguous data block in a physical memory, and splitting the contiguous data block into a first data packet payload and a second data packet payload based on a target packet size. Additionally, another contiguous data block can be combined into one of the first and second data packet payloads based on the target packet size, wherein the first and second data packet payloads may be transferred in a data stream through a host interface that does not support scatter/gather lists. In one example, a software driver is used to split and combine the contiguous data blocks.