Advantages of Static Routing:
Static routing has some enormous advantages over dynamic routing. Chief among these advantages is predictability. Because the network administrator computes the routing table in advance, the path a packet takes between two destinations is always known precisely, and can be controlled exactly. With dynamic routing, the path taken depends on which devices and links are functioning, and how the routers have interpreted the updates from other routers.
Additionally, because no dynamic routing protocol is needed, static routing doesn't impose any overhead on the routers or the network links. While this overhead may be minimal on an FDDI ring, or even on an Ethernet segment, it could be a significant portion of network bandwidth on a low-speed dial-up link. Consider a network with 200 network segments. Every 30 seconds, as required by the RIP specification, the routers all send an update containing reachability information for all 200 of these segments. With each route taking 16 octets of space, plus a small amount of overhead, the minimum size for an update in this network is over three kilobytes. Each router must therefore send a 3 Kb update on each of its interfaces every 30 seconds. As you can see, for a large network, the bandwidth devoted to routing updates can add up quickly.
Disadvantages of Static Routing:
While static routing has advantages over dynamic routing, it is not without its disadvantages. The price of its simplicity is a lack of scalability. For five network segments on three routers, computing an appropriate route from every router to every destination is not difficult. However, many networks are much larger. Consider what the routing might look like for a network with 200 network segments interconnected by more than a dozen routers. To implement static routing, you would need to compute the next hop for each network segment for each router, or more than 2,400 routes! As you can see, the task of precomputing routing tables quickly becomes a burden, and is prone to errors.
Of course, you could argue that this computation need only occur once, when the network is first built. But what happens when a network segment moves, or is added? While the computation may be relatively easy, to implement the change, you would have to update the configuration for every router on the network. If you miss one, in the best case, segments attached to that router will be unable to reach the moved or added segment. In the worst case, you'll create a routing loop that affects many routers.