The recommendation to only wipe the first and last part of the drive before reusing them is inadequate. You're best off wiping the entire drive with either zeros or hdparm security-erase-enhanced. The reason is that not all metadata is kept just at the beginning or end of the drive, especially if you have multiple partitions in the drive.

If that is untenable, mdadm has an option --zero-superblock, lvm has pvremove, and wipefs will remove file system signatures, which you can run before changing the storage layout.