US Patent 9298633 Adaptive prefecth for predicted write requests

Implementations are provided herein relating to adaptive prefetch for predicted write requests. A set of I/O requests associated with a set of storage devices and a set of cache memory can be monitored. Through the application of a prefetch algorithm to the set of monitored I/O requests, future write requests can be predicted. Data blocks corresponding to the predicted future write requests can be read in parallel with other disk I/O and preloaded into cache for access by, for example, data protection processes. In this sense the efficiency of data protection processes can be enhanced by reducing sequential disk I/O requests.