Be warned that only the Shield Pro is usable for Plex hosting (the regular Shield doesn’t have USB ports to my knowledge or they can’t be used for hard drives last I checked but I could have out of date information so feel free to check up on that).

It is advisable to use a VPN, yes. The alternative would be to use either a so-called debrid service or a seedbox.

VPNs can be had for $3-$5/month if you buy at least a year (slightly more if you buy 1-3 month increments) and are what I’d recommend for most beginners assuming you can have a computer on for 4-5 hours a day when needed to finish downloads. I would recommend actually buying only a few months right now and waiting for Black Friday/Cyber Monday for some deals. (Airvpn in particular almost always has steep discounts then that should shave a dollar a month off. If you want to go with a company like Proton or Mullvad instead you can though they don’t do sales AFAIK. I don’t recommend the big app-store VPNs which are mostly run by one shady and dishonest company.)

Most decent VPNs are pretty fast but they are limited by your own internet speeds. I can regularly get 80-100Mbp/s on a VPN but my home internet is 1G/1G fiber. If you have cable internet that’s only 20/10 then you can’t get more than that. You will probably only ever be able to reach 80-90% of your home internet’s speed on a VPN but most modern cable connections are fast enough this is fine. If it really turns out to be an issue you can get a seedbox.

Seedboxes are generally $6-$10/month. The upside of a seedbox is it’s remotely hosted for you, has extremely high bandwidth, seeds back for you and means you don’t have to leave a machine on to download, you just connect to the machine and collect the downloaded files. The downside of seedboxes is they tend to be more expensive than just a VPN and on the public sites are not really necessary. Now if you ever get into private sites, maybe worth re-considering to maintain ratio and not get smacked with hit-n-runs.

Debrid services started as something for people to avoid paying for direct download site subscriptions but many of them work with torrents. They work similarly to seedboxes but it’s not unique to you, they download it for you and delete it once you and all other users who requested the torrent grab the file so they don’t seed back. They’re a bit more complicated and probably not advisable over a VPN for people new to this IMO. I mainly mention it for completeness.

For sites:

• 1337x dot to is really the only completely public site I can recommend these days. Rarbg was great but they died, don’t be fooled by any sites claiming to be them.
• However rutracker dot org is also really good though most stuff there is full size bluray rips and remuxes. The issue being its in Russian though obviously translation tools exist.

I would bookmark this site: https://fmhy.net/torrentpiracyguide Read the guide, check the beginner guide, check the safe sites list, avoid anything on the unsafe sites list.

Get ublock origin on whatever browser you’ll be using for finding torrents.

Personally I would recommend jackett. If you’re going to be doing torrenting on your personal machine I recommend that you:

• use qBittorrent
• bind its adapter to your VPN adapter (under options > advanced) this prevents leaks of your real IP address, even if your VPN connection fails no torrent traffic will be able to leave it.
• get jackett, by installing and configuring Jackett you no longer have to browse individual sites and can simply search from within qbittorrent https://github.com/Jackett/Jackett
• Set up searchers for qbittorrent and include jackett (view > search engine checked > lower right corner in search tab “search plugins” > check for updates
• configure jackett (this is a little too indepth for here and maybe I’ll post another guide sometime for it)
• enjoy searching without opening a browser (you can even search rutracker without having to worry about translating though you need to first set-up an account and set your credentials in jackett.

Never, ever use an email you use for personal or business use to sign up on any torrent sites. Get a free protonmail account just for such sign-ups (will also save you a lot of potential spam).

Lastly, around the holiday season (think end of November through first week of January next year) many private trackers open their doors. It’s a good time to get in. In particular torrentleech [dot] org is a good general purpose tracker with fairly low requirements though you may need to get a seedbox to keep up with minimum seeding reqs. But this is just something to keep in mind, dip your toes into the public sites, if they don’t quite have your needs you can see about private site stuff. Someone who definitely isn’t me still gets most of their content from public sites despite being in several private ones.