Asynchronous prefetch tries to avoid unnecessary physical reads. During recovery and during nonclustered index scans, look-ahead sets are exact, fetching only the pages referenced by page number in the transaction log or on index pages.
Look-ahead sets for table scans, clustered index scans, and dbcc checks are more speculative and may lead to unnecessary reads. During sequential scans, unnecessary I/O can take place due to:
Page chain fragmentation on allpages-locked tables
Heavy cache utilization by multiple users
