Systems and methods which provide for improved prefetching schemes for caching data in a storage network are described. In one embodiment, a dynamically adaptive prefetching mechanism based on block access history information and prior effectiveness of prefetching is provided. Embodiments may take into account prefetch efficiency; a dynamic value indicating the usefulness of past prefetches, prefetch wastage, in conjunction with prefetch resources available at any point in time, to determine the number of blocks to read-ahead during a prefetch. Such embodiments provide improvements over file-based prefetching and previous block schemes, as they provide a finer grain of control over both prefetch block selection, and the number of blocks to prefetch based on block (or block range) access history.