[development] Drupal way to seed data for a module.

Hi, I'm building a module that has a lot of supporting data (it's a custom shipping module that maps postcodes/zips to regions etc.) and know that I can create the table using hook_schema() and could use hook_install() to add rows of data to the schema, but I'm talking tens of thousands of rows, so wondering if there is a better method for doing this? Anthony.