Rob Farley goes into detail on the Actual Rows Read property in execution plans:
The warning says “Operation caused residual IO. The actual number of rows read was 2,130, but the number of rows returned was 2.” Sure enough, further up we see “Actual Rows Read” saying 2,130, and Actual Rows at 2.
Whoa! To find those rows, we had to look through 2,130?
You see, the way that the Seek runs is to start by thinking about the Seek Predicate. That’s the one that leverages the index nicely, and which actually causes the operation to be a Seek. Without a Seek Predicate, the operation becomes a Scan. Now, if this Seek Predicate is guaranteed to be at most one row (such as when it has an equality operator on a unique index), then we have a Singleton seek. Otherwise, we have a Range Scan, and this range can have a Prefix, a Start, and an End (but not necessarily both a Start and an End). This defines the rows in the table that we’re interested in for the Seek.
But ‘interested in’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘returned’, because we might have more work to do. That work is described in the other Predicate, which is often known as the Residual Predicate.
Definitely worth a read.