[icehawk]

and you certaintly get what you pay for, DS3231s fry almost as easily as MAX3232s,

(And you can do the same thing were you write the time to the RTC before you have the correct time)

[Joel_Mckay]

I have used these in product designs before with zero failures. Where exactly did you buy your samples?

We found they drift less than 28s a year in standalone mode. Also, were repeatable within +-18ms when using a NTP client.

Microchip RTCs are harder to setup, but also seem to work just as well (ignoring the goofy epoch).

Chip shortage caused people to do unspeakable things.... ;-)

[hcfman]

You could buy an rtc and put up with that kind of clock drift, or.... for the same money or less you could be a GPS and have none of that drift.

[r2_pilot]

(a bit more money for the GPS to be fair) not even mentioning the fact that you should have clear-ish access to the sky, the time taken for you to receive the time data, and the possibility of jamming. I could go on but the two methods have differing modes of operation and failure despite ultimately being capable of fulfilling the need for a reasonably synchronized clock

[M95D]

I have a DS1307 installed ever since I bought a RPi3B+. It didn't fail and it's accurate enough until NTP updates the time.

Are you sure you connected it correctly?