The pvcreate command initializes a physical volume for later use by the Logical Volume Manager for Linux. Each physical volume can be a disk partition, whole disk, meta device, or loopback file.

What is Pvcreate?

pvcreate initializes a Physical Volume (PV) on a device so the device is recognized as belonging to LVM. This allows the PV to be used in a Volume Group (VG). An LVM disk label is written to the device, and LVM metadata areas are initialized. A PV can be placed on a whole device or partition.

Does Pvcreate destroy data?

Never pvcreate, not mkfs, will securely delete a partition. They do not write to much of the partition. They only write what they need to, the rest is ignored. When the OS reads this partition, it will see what type it is, and only follow links to initialised data, the rest with old stuff will be ignored.