A method for supporting simultaneous mixed protection modes for a write operation. The method includes receiving a write request that includes write data, and is received from one of a plurality of requestors. At least one of the requestors does not support data integrity protection. It is determined if data integrity protection is required for the write operation. It is additionally determined if the data integrity protection is supported by the requestor. Once the determination is made, the data integrity protection value is calculated if data integrity protection is required and is not supported by the requestor. The write data is encoded with the data integrity protection value prior to being written. If the requestor supports data integrity protection, then data integrity protection values are applied to the write data prior to writing the data to the external storage.