This will refresh the 'view' of the index in a more performant manner, but without "on-disk" guarantees. (Solr4.0+)
A soft commit is much faster since it only makes index changes visible and does not fsync index files or write a new index descriptor.
If the JVM crashes or there is a loss of power, changes that occurred after the last hard commit will be lost.
Search collections that have near-real-time requirements (that want index changes to be quickly visible to searches) will want to soft commit often but hard commit less frequently.