Best small tablet?

Hello! As the title states, I'm on the hunt for a small tablet, and trying to find advice from people before I drive to eight different stores to test out potential purchases. Much rather go to only one or two! My primary use for the thing will be to read textbooks in class and take copious amounts of notes. Handwritten, not typed. Getting tired of dragging multiple notebooks around and then storing them because I want to keep my (way too detailed) notes for future reference. I'm weird and actually do reference old class notes.

My daughter uses Nebo on her S6 tablet and I like the setup when I tried out her tablet, but the screen is too big. My knee jerk buy was a mini iPad (6th gen?), but only because of the smaller size. Much prefer small notebooks. Give me a regular size piece of paper and I still only use half the sheet, or fold it in half and make it four "sheets". Looking at the options the S9 is usually cheaper, but it's a decent big bigger. Is there a smaller/older tablet that anyone can suggest? My wallet is crying about spending more than $500USD on a glorified notebook. I already have a Windows laptop that doesn't need replacement, and have the e-reader for my books. My phone is Samsung, but only because it was the free upgrade option.