The country matters here. Though overall, isn’t it distributing it what constitutes as the piracy part rather than just ripping something? As far as I am aware, ripping a disk for personal consumption (so long as nobody gets access to your library) should be no different from backing up media that you won.
Laptops tend to be energy efficient. Generally speaking the energy savings are not that great with it being turned off. You can check the power brick specifications. Take the watttage of the brick and multiply it by 8 (or however long you plan to keep it off during the night). Now divide that by 1000 and multiply by your electricity price (generally it’s given out by kWh so if it’s different where you live adjust the numbers accordingly). That’s how much money you save per night
For example where I live from one of the providers the cost is 0.227 EUR/kWh (we could go down to 0.158 EUR/kWh if we use 2 timezone pricing since we only need the nighttime).
((60W × 8h) / 1000) × 0.227 EUR/kWh = 0.10896 EUR
So each day I turn off a 60W brick off for the night the maximum savings is ~11 cents or ~39 EUR per year. So that would answer your question of is it worth it. There is no real damage to the device for being plugged in 24/7. The battery may degrade, but at this stage battery capacity is irrelevant.
As for storage, external storage via USB is not going to be as fast, but in this case I doubt it will matter much, any peformance loss is likely to be negligable, though I can’t be 100% certain. Try it out, worst case replace the internal drive later down the line if performance is an issue, though make sure that it’s the I/O that is hampering performance and not let’s say CPU or memory.
Mainly started off with using Plex since shows that I wanted to watch were simply not available on any service available to me. Now it gets used when the service where the content would be available craps itself.
Otherwise I use it to host a nightscout service for my diabetes management since the CGM manufacturer dropped support for an old phone I kept around for no other reason than to use the CGM since the new phone I had was never supported to begin with. Granted now the manufacturer came out with a standalone receiver, but why bother when I can just use my regular phone now?
Jellyfin. Just be weary that it’s not great in some cases depending on your hardware. A media server is typically a weak workstation PC. I found that Jellyfin does not handle ASS (most common format for Anime) subtitles well, though if you only have SRT subtitles you should be fine.
There are a few other little things that are missing, such as sorting shows by date last episode was added and the clicking on a show button will always start the very first episode available instead of the next un-played episode.
I actually host nightscout, that’s the one that is mainly useful for me personally. Technically nightscout advocates against self-hosting but it actually seemed simpler for me to self host than figuring out and keeping track of which providers will give me enough for free to run it since it keeps changing.
Since my router has openVPN I just use that, never seen much reason to go for anything else