To guarantee on-disk consistency, programs like database servers call fsync for every transaction. By definition an fsync involves events on the hardware level and even in an SSD this gives a slowdown. The SSD can use a write cache to speed this up. However should you lose power and the write cache is not backed by a small battery, you lose your most recent write(s) even though the latest fsync call guaranteed that the changes were on disk. The battery allows the SSD to successfully flush the write cache to disk in the event that the computer shuts down.