Would installing an OS on an external ssd and booting into that to run pirated software while blocking access to other drives in your system or physically unplugging them be one way?
Or are there better ways to isolate the software you run and use as much as possible?
If you want to play games in VM you will probably need qemu/kvm and sepparate GPU for passthrough. Otherwise your VM will struggle to load anything serious. But I think others use that mostly to run windows apps on linux machine or simmilar. Maybe you can just dualboot from 2nd drive, it should be 100% safe if you unplug your main drive, but thats probably overkill. Im no expert, just putting it here so you can google