Why are they telling you this? Is the drive bad? Will it take a regular format? A low level or zero fill requires a utility from the manufacturer. It was something that was done on older drives to "refurbish" them when they showed too many bad sectors. I've never heard of it being done on modern drives and it certainly isn't anything to do with Linux.

Zero format is most of the times unnecessary, maybe you only need to fdisk it and reformat as usual, add -C or command line option for checking bad sectors. Don't think you need something more